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Scouting, Aisne Valley 
(Afternoon, June 30th, 1915) 



BY MOTOR TO THE 
FIRING LINE 

AN ARTIST'S NOTES AND SKETCHES 
WITH THE ARMIES OF NORTHERN 
FRANCE :: :: JUNE-JULY, 1915 

BY 

WALTER HALE 



WITH DRAWINGS AND PHOTOGRAPHS 
BY THE AUTHOR 




NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1916 



•H3 



Copyright, 1915, 1916, by 
THE CENTURY CO. 



Copyright, 1916, by 
P. F. COLLIER & SON, INC. 



Published, April, 1916 



APR 28 1916 
JCLA428728 



to owen johnson in appreciation 

of his loyalty this volume is 

gratefully inscribed by 

The Author 



FOREWORD 

Before the reader plunges into the following 
pages, it is only fair to warn him that the author's 
first effort as a war-correspondent was an unquali- 
fied failure. This was not alone the author's 
fault, since — though he be ever so ambitious — one 
cannot succeed as a war-correspondent unless there 
be a war to correspond about. The scene of this 
fruitless endeavor was on the Venezuelan coast at 
the time when certain of the European nations sent 
fleets to the Spanish Main in an effort to collect 
sums of money, long overdue, from the Castro 
government. Germany, the most aggressive of the 
Powers involved, had threatened to land marines 
on Venezuelan soil. The violation of the Monroe 
Doctrine could lead to only one eventuality. In 
anticipation of this, correspondents representing 
the leading journals of the United States and 
Europe gathered at La Guayra and Caracas, rest- 
lessly awaiting the commencement of hostilities, 
like chargers on the eve of battle. 

But, for a very good reason — and that's another 
story — Germany did not land marines on Vene- 

vii 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

zuelan soil. The blockade was lifted and one by 
one the correspondents drifted back home to en- 
gage in more peaceful pursuits until the Russo- 
Japanese War again called them into action. 

If we who went to the Spanish Main found no 
war to write about, the correspondents who for 
some eighteen months have made Paris their head- 
quarters have been within a few hours' journey 
of the greatest general actions in history with only 
an occasional limited permit to view their various 
phases. The old-time freedom of the war corre- 
spondent has not only been curbed — it has been 
taken away from him and checked among the musty 
archives of the War Office. And with the with- 
drawal of many of his privileges, he has lost some- 
thing of his former "camaraderie." The men I 
knew in Venezuela were working together in per- 
fect harmony; if one was granted an interview or 
secured an important bit of information, he shared 
the story with the others. 

In the Great War, the tendency has been — in 
many instances — to beat out the other fellow, to be 
the first to reach a beleaguered city or to visit a 
certain battleground or to explore exposed trenches 
close to the enemies' lines. As a matter of fact, 
since the correspondents usually visit the front in 
parties of from two to five, it is almost impossible 

viii 



FOREWORD 

to obtain an exclusive story and I am reasonably 
sure that no privileges are extended to one group 
that are withheld from another. The War Office 
sends them into the same general positions, but the 
War Office cannot discount the element of chance. 
There are some men upon whom fate smiles and 
for them what commenced as a good imitation of 
a glorified Cook's Tour may be turned at the psy- 
chological moment into a vivid and dramatic ex- 
perience. Bombardments have a habit of starting 
at unexpected times and places and certain staff 
officers are more lenient than others about escorting 
their charges into dangerous salients. 

Once at the front, chance rather than privilege 
plays the more important part in affording the cor- 
respondent opportunities. 

For example, as I looked out over the Aisne val- 
ley from a chateau east of Rheims there was only 
an occasional puff of white or yellow smoke in the 
distance to suggest that anything unusual was oc- 
curring in this wide stretch of peaceful landscape. 
Seven weeks later, another correspondent, standing 
in the same position, would have seen the same plain 
torn up by shrapnel and shell and echoing the 
thunder of thousands of guns as black masses of 
men rocked through the valley in the great Cham- 
pagne offensive — the bitterest fighting in the west- 

ix 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

ern area since the Marne up to the launching of the 
present drive at Verdun. 

At Bethany those of our party who went into 
the trenches would not have had to work their way 
out under a salvo from the German lines had not 
a captive balloon been aloft for observation at the 
moment when their motor car pulled up in the dis- 
tance behind a clump of trees. 

Again, although our autorisation for the Artois 
sector included a visit to Arras, I am sure that in 
the face of an unusually heavy bombardment we 
would not have been permitted to enter the town 
except that a fortunate drizzle of rain hid from 
view objects approaching over the roads raked by 
the German artillery. This same mist made pos- 
sible our visit to Blangy, where the Germans oc- 
cupied one corner of the brewery and the French 
all the rest of the same building and the lines were 
probably closer together than at any other point 
from the Vosges to the Channel. 

It was because of an early morning haze cling- 
ing close to the ground that we made our interest- 
ing excursion over the battle-scarred hillside of 
Notre Dame de Lorette. It was because we were 
temporarily in charge of an intrepid officer who 
stretched to the utmost limit the bounds of his au- 
thority that we were allowed to crawl over the face 



FOREWORD 

of the hill into the trenches just captured from the 
Germans on the grand eperon. At this juncture, as 
the haze lifted beneath a hot sun, a certain head 
was not ducked far enough below the crumpled 
parapets to escape the watchful German observers 
and we had to make our way back to the bomb- 
proofs within the French lines through a steady- 
shower of projectiles. 

Thus, on a few occasions, opportunity knocked 
at the door for us. 

Months later, as I think of Notre Dame, I am 
reminded of the men I met there in the trenches. 
During the excursion over the hillside I took many 
photographs of the poilus and after my return to 
New York I mailed proofs to them. In each case 
an interesting post card or letter came in acknowl- 
edgment. With three of the men who had been in 
our personal escort, and to whom I sent also news- 
papers and magazines, I kept up a correspond- 
ence. One by one their letters ceased. The last — 
written after the desperate battles for the posses- 
sion of Souchez and Givenchy — came from a pri- 
vate in a mitrailleuse company of the 26th Brigade. 
It described how he escaped injury by a miracle 
under the guns about the sugar mill. It spoke of 
the splendid courage and elan of his regiment. It 
added that all but one of the officers we had known 

xi 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

had come through the various actions in safety. 
Captain Pierre, whose photograph is one of my 
illustrations, had fallen while leading his men 
across a shell-swept area near Ablain St. Nazaire. 

I have deceived my reader if he believes the pur- 
pose of this introduction is to show wherein oppor- 
tunity comes to the few correspondents in the 
Great War and overlooks the many. Nor am I 
writing it to beg his indulgence because the pages 
that follow — instead of reflecting the viewpoint of 
a strategist or the experienced writer of fiction — 
are rather the impressions of an illustrator who has 
spent the happiest days of his life motoring in 
France. 

It has been written that I might pay a little trib- 
ute to the memory of the men I knew on the Notre 
Dame de Lorette hillside — the men whose letters 
no longer come to me. 

W. H. 

New York, March 3, 1916. 



Xll 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



CHAPTEB PAGE 

I. A VOYAGE OF ADVENTUEE 3 

II. A NEW PARIS OF OLD MEMORIES 16 

III. A MOTOR TOUR TO RHEIMS AND THE CHAMPAGNE DISTRICT . 47 

IV. IN THE AISNE VALLEY 71 

V. SOISSONS— A RETROSPECT 91 

VI. A LITTLE JOURNEY TO COMPIEGNE 106 

Vn. THE BELEAGUERED CITY OF ARRAS 121 

Vin. BACK OF THE FRONT— DOULLENS AND ALBERT 155 

E. ONE DAY (JULY 8) IN THE ARTOIS SECTOR 177 

X. AFTERWARD— MOTORING IN THE PATH OF WAR 222 



ILLUSTRATIONS FROM THE 
AUTHOR'S DRAWINGS 

Scouting — Aisne Valley. (Afternoon, June 30, 1915) . . . Frontispiece 

PAGE 

The great doors, Rheims Cathedral 5 

Bombardment of St. Jean des Vignes, Soissons 84 

Effects of shell fire, Soissons Cathedral 93 

The end of a cul-de-sac, Arras 128 

An inn courtyard after bombardment, Arras 137 

Notre Dame de Brebieres, Albert 148 

The Rue du Bourg, Doullens 157 

Shrapnel and shell, Bois de Bouvigny, July 8th 196 

Sketch map of the Artois sector 202-3 

A modern battle-field 209 

Jouy St. Servins 248 

The ruined church at Ribecourt 257 



LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS 

PAGE 

The Espagne coming up the Gironde 14 

Cuirassiers in the procession escorting the remains of Rouget de l'lsle, 

Paris 19 

Army chauffeurs at Epernay — June 26 26 ' 

The tree bordered Marne canal 31 v 

Automobile commissary train, Champagne district. (Photo by French 

Government) 38 

An artilleryman watering his horse in a village back of the front in the 

Aisne valley 43 

At staff headquarters in the Aisne valley 50 

Entrance to the deserted Chateau Fere d'Isly 55 v 

Staff motor car with wire cutting apparatus. (Photo by French Gov- 
ernment) 62 

Watching effect of salvo from French "75's." Artillery position in the 

Aisne valley — June 28 67 ' 

French war plane in a wheat field of the Champagne district ... 74 

Heavy artillery en route to the front. (Photo by French Government) 79 

A motor mitralleuse. (Photo by French Government) 98 

Pontoon bridge across the Oise at Compiegne 103 

Protecting with sandbags the Porte de la Vierge Doree, Amiens Cathe- 
dral 118 

Our motors held up by shell fire, Route Nationale between Arras and 

Doullens— July 7 123 

Motor car destroyed by a shell, Arras. (Photo by French Government) 162 

Effects of shell fire and explosive bombs over the great portals of Arras 

Cathedral 167 

A motor car destroyed by shell fire in the ruins of the Hotel de Ville, 

Arras — July 7 174 

A snapshot from the garret of the brewery at Blangy. The German 
lines are 60 yards away in the ditch between the ruined outbuild- 
ings 179 



LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS 

PAGE 

Movement of an army division by motor transport through Doullens — 

morning of July 9 186 

A battery of "75's" passing through Avesnes-le-Comte .... 191 

Waiting to run the gauntlet across the zone of German fire on the Bou- 

vigny plateau 214 

The modern dispatch bearer, the "Baby Peugeot" that takes the place 

of the old time orderly on his dashing steed 219 

First line French trenches advanced position 11.40 a.m. — July 8. 

Notre Dame de Lorette 226 

Battle-field of Notre Dame de Lorette, showing effects of big gun fire on 

trees and ploughed up earth 231 

Fox terrier and her puppies born under the fire of French and German 

guns in the Spahi position 238 

A New York chauffeur in a block house near Ablain St. Nazaire — 

July 8 243 

German prisoner and his captor near Ablain St. Nazaire .... 262 

Our Renault trapped 267 

Poilus back of the lines in the Artois sector waiting for dusk to take 

their places at the front 274 

French post cards 279 



BY MOTOR TO THE 
FIRING LINE 



BY MOTOR TO THE 
FIRING LINE 

CHAPTER I 

A VOYAGE OF ADVENTURE 

On our arrival in France we would not go up to 
the front by the ordinary methods of transporta- 
tion. We would go up in a motor — my motor. 
The scheme from its inception had the advantage 
of simplicity. We would ship the car to Bordeaux. 
From there we would have no trouble reaching the 
various points along the line that stretches from the 
Vosges to the Channel. From Saint-Die I planned 
to nibble my way eastward, up to the front and back 
again, up to the front and back again. Thus we 
would have a look in at the forts about Verdun, at 
Saint-Mihiel, the Argonne district, Rheims, the 
Aisne Valley, Soissons, Compiegne, Arras, and the 
famous Artois sector about Notre Dame de Lorette. 
We would be armed with the proper passports, 
magazine credentials, touring-club membership 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

cards and letters from influential Americans. 
Owen Johnson, the literary half of the expedition, 
had been educated in Paris and had many friends 
in the army and among the leaders of the new min- 
istry. I had had some years' experience motoring 
in France and knew well most of the highways and 
byways along the battle front. 

The scheme seemed feasible. But it had hardly 
gone beyond the preparatory stages before the skids 
were applied to it. Our plans were not altered by 
the conflicting advice of numerous friends. If I 
listened to them, I would not send my car to Bor- 
deaux. I would send it to Marseilles instead. I 
would not take it abroad at all, but would rent one, 
with a military chauffeur, in Paris. Or again, it 
were best not to depend on a motor; the war in the 
western area had settled down to a long siege in 
fixed positions, and we could easily reach the front 
by either train or taxicab. Why, they were even 
running motor-bus excursions from Paris to the 
ruins of Senlis, where the German drive was 
checked on the eve of the Battle of the Marne! 

We thought we knew more about all these things 
than our friends. But our confidence was jarred 
somewhat by the stories of returned travelers. 

4 







The Great Doors, Rheims Cathedral 



A VOYAGE OF ADVENTURE 

From them it appeared that although the Touring 
Club of France was exploiting a propaganda in 
England showing the attractions of southern 
France for motorists, it was no simple matter to 
make your way about even as far away from the 
battle lines as Burgundy, Touraine, Gascony, and 
Provence. For foreigners to motor with any free- 
dom in the northern provinces, with every main road 
and every lane guarded by Territorials, was out of 
the question. 

I called up the French Line, and any lingering 
doubt in my mind was set at rest. It would cost 
nearly $400, or over twice as much as in peace 
times, to carry my car across the ocean. So I drove 
it down to the dead storage building and tucked it 
away for the summer. 

Knowing what I did of freight rates, I was sur- 
prised to find so many crated motors on the pier. 
But they were trucks and ambulances consigned to 
the French army. And at adjoining piers, in place 
of the graceful liners of the White Star and Com- 
pagnie Generale Transatlantique was a nondescript 
fleet of battle-scarred tramps loading other crated 
trucks and dismembered aeroplanes consigned to 
Petrograd, Havre, London, and Genoa. Who ever 

7 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

heard of a ship in New York Harbor that boasted 
Rouen as her home port? Yet here was JLe Coq of 
Rouen, a rusty-sided thick-bellied hooker that had 
probably never before been more than two hundred 
miles beyond the mouth of the Seine. She had 
come in light with her propeller well exposed above 
the water line ; she would go out loaded to the gun- 
wales with a cargo capable of blowing the adjoin- 
ing wharves and shipping higher than the Wool- 
worth tower. 

There was an undercurrent of excitement on the 
Espagne as we neared the French coast. It was a 
gusty night, with banks of heavy clouds' rushing 
across the sky and occasional shafts of light on the 
horizon from a lighthouse or a protecting cruiser. 
In the smoke room, with the incandescent globes 
dimmed, the ports closed, and a woman in the ad- 
joining salon still wearing the life belt in which she 
had appeared at dinner, we were not to lose sight 
of the utility of the motor-driven vehicle in the 
present war. At the time it was quite as interest- 
ing a subject as any other. Out of the mass of 
figures and details that floated through the hazy 
atmosphere I gathered that a story current at the 
time we sailed was untrue. 

8 



A VOYAGE OF ADVENTURE 

The average life of a horse in the army was not 
one week. It was considerably longer. The aver- 
age term of service of a motor truck at the front 
was not three weeks, but the vehicle would continue 
on the job as long as they cared to give it attention. 
The speaker was a manufacturer from the West 
who had sold two hundred chassis to the French 
Government shortly after the outbreak of the war. 
He said that more trucks were in the repair shop 
through incompetent or reckless driving than as a 
result of shell fire. Of his large consignment not 
more than a dozen had been severely damaged by 
the German artillery and only one so completely 
wrecked that it had to be scrapped. 

There were no taxicabs waiting on the quay at 
Bordeaux to whisk us up to the hotel. In fact, there 
were no cabs of any kind waiting on the quay. A 
mysterious wireless message received on board the 
night before made things easy for us with the offi- 
cials. Johnson was thereby enabled to catch the 
"Rapide" for Paris while I remained behind to pass 
our luggage through the customs and send it to the 
station. This done, I looked in vain for a taxi or a 
cab. I hailed a bus marked "Service de Ville," but 
it was engaged. Then I stopped an electric car. 

9 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

The conductor was a woman in black, and she was 
very businesslike. It occurred to me that if taxis 
were so scarce in Bordeaux we might have some 
difficulty in renting an automobile in Paris. 

Early in the morning, as we had come up the 
Garonne past the famous vineyards of the Medoc 
I had noticed files of German prisoners at work un- 
der guard in the shipyards and fields. At Bor- 
deaux four women out of five were in mourning, 
young men were conspicuous by their absence, and 
the brilliantly lighted cafes on the Allees de Tourny 
closed at half past ten at night. 

The next day, as I looked out of the windows of 
the Paris express, I thought that the countryside 
of France never looked more peaceful, the landscape 
more smiling and prosperous. 

A little later we passed a hospital train at Li- 
bourne. A second train rattled into the station just 
as we were pulling out. The seriously wounded 
were lying on stretchers hung in the third-class car- 
riages, those less dangerously hurt sitting at the 
windows or standing on crutches in the open doors 
— everywhere white bandages and slings, heads 
swathed in lint, bodies tossing uneasily on the nar- 
row cots. A smell of ether and antiseptics pervaded 

10 



A VOYAGE OF ADVENTURE 

the station. In the center of each train was a dark- 
green carriage with sterilizing plant, operating 
room, and X-ray motor, "The gift of Bar- 
oness " lettered in white on the outside. Two 

long trainloads of broken humanity, the harvest of 
one day's operations in a sector of the battle line! 
The war was being brought closer to me. 

As we traveled on it was evident that private 
motor cars had been to a large extent swept off the 
roads of France. This was all familiar country. It 
was with a real feeling of emotion that I gazed on 
that long, white highway, deserted now except for 
an occasional cart or a few black specks where a 
group of peasant women were returning from the 
fields. This was route nationale No. 10 — many 
times had I driven over it on my way from Paris 
to the Pyrenees. And I fancied I could hear 
through the clatter of trucks on the rails the rhyth- 
mic purr of the motor as my car swept on through 
long avenues of trees. 

Angouleme passed, where were quartered many 
troops in peace times. I recollected driving through 
its narrow streets in the twilight when red-legged 
piou-pious were so plentiful that they seemed to hop 
up out of the chinks between the cobbles. They are 

11 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

bearded poilus now, with sterner lines in their faces 
and a look in their eyes one never forgets. At 
Poitiers I was reminded of the horrible little hotel 
across from the Gare wherein I passed an unhappy- 
night. Red Cross nurses and boy scouts ("boy 
scoots" the French call them) were in the station 
waiting with trays of fruit and sandwiches for a 
trainload of wounded shortly due. 

At a little station nearing Tours a group of sol- 
diers in full marching equipment were waiting to 
entrain for the north. Stuck in their caps or held 
in their hands were nosegays of wild flowers. A 
little Cuban girl in my compartment leaned out of 
the window. "Tuez les boches!" she cried. They 
smiled and waved their nosegays as the train 
crawled on. 

We were now in the valley of the Loire, in Bal- 
zac's sunny province of Touraine. That other de- 
serted ribbon of road to the right is route na- 
tionale No. 152, that runs through the Chateaux 
country westward to the ancient Province of An- 
jou. A flood of motor memories swept over me. 
At Tours Robert Lorraine, before he had become 
famous as an aviator and been wounded while serv- 
ing his country in Flanders, had dashed proudly up 

12 





The Espagne coming up the Gironde 



A VOYAGE OF ADVENTURE 

to the hotel doorway in his little runabout. At 
Amboise, under the shadow of the ancient castle 
that rears its walls above the shimmering river, I 
had worked part of a night over a recalcitrant feed 
pipe. At Chaumont we had climbed up through the 
rain to the chateau and stumbled into the presence 
of a royal personage from England. Blois, Cham- 
bord, Beaugency, Orleans — each historic place had 
for me some intimate recollection of the friends 
with whom I had toured in France. Ah, mes amis! 
I thought of you, and I wondered if we would ever 
live any of these days over again after the country 
that we loved with a real affection had emerged 
triumphant from the greatest crisis in her history. 



15 



CHAPTER II 

A NEW PARIS OF OLD MEMORIES 

Uniforms of blue and red and black with gold 
braid were more than usually conspicuous in the 
surging crowd at the Gare d'Orleans when we ar- 
rived in Paris. There were more women in black 
on the station platform and a dearth of taxi autos 
in the rank outside. A private motor drawn up at 
the curb was lost among low gray machines with an 
army number in white on the bonnet. No, while 
the station and quai beyond took on a familiar ap- 
pearance, the Paris of this evening was not the 
same Paris of many other June evenings in less 
eventful years. 

All the taxicabs had been commandeered by the 
time I had collected our various trunks and parcels. 
The driver of the horse-drawn vehicle that fell to 
my lot knew naught of the Hotel Meyerbeer, Le 
vieux Parisien this, a cabby of the old type — bulb- 
ous nose, glazed hat, red vest and a horse that sup- 
ported himself unsteadily on his underpinnings. 

16 



A NEW PARIS OF OLD MEMORIES 

He — the driver — was a relic of the old slow-moving 
days before the era of the taxi auto. The war had 
brought him and his spavined steed back to life 
again. The cloud that swept before it the young 
chauffeur and his little motor passed him by — 
a derelict. Rejuvenated he was again roaming 
the streets that had been his in another genera- 
tion. 

To my faulty pronunciation I blamed the fact 
that he could not understand my direction. I first 
called it the Hotel Meyerbeer. Then I tried it a 
number of ways — Meyarbare, Meerbeer, Mayer- 
beer — and to all he shook his head. I was about to 
go to another hotel and let Johnson find me with 
the aid of the police when a cocher in the gathering 
multitude remembered that the name had been 
changed to the Hotel Alexandre III. 

After effecting a junction with my advance 
guard at the hotel I learned that at the beginning 
of the war, in the first rage against everything 
German in name — streets, plays, wines, individuals, 
merchant houses — Meyerbeer had flaunted his Teu- 
tonic patronymic above the chestnut trees that en- 
circle the Rond Point des Champs Elysees. The 
proprietor, although three of his sons had been 

17 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

mobilized and were fighting with the French forces 
in Alsace and at the Marne, yielded to popular 
clamor and a new gilt sign appeared on his roof 
and a new name on the hotel stationery. 

I am still wondering whether the old cabby could 
not understand my French or was merely too patri- 
otic to carry a fare to a hotel with a German 
appellation. 

On the first night in Paris — and for many nights 
thereafter — I was disturbed by a drumming, dron- 
ing noise. It came out of the darkness, sometimes 
close to my bedroom window, sometimes high in the 
sky overhead. It was the throb of the aeroplanes 
over Paris. To guard against Zeppelins and the 
bomb-dropping Taubes of the early days of the 
war, a certain number of French aviators ascended 
at dusk each evening and patrolled to and fro over 
the city until daybreak. 

I have been kept awake by various noises in my 
travels — by the clanging trolley cars of a middle 
western town, by the little hoot owls of the Tuscan 
hills, by the echoing footsteps in Waterport Street, 
Gibraltar, and by the shrill cries of the hawkers in 
Cadiz and Seville. But this insistent droning of 
the throbbing motors overhead was a new experi- 

18 




Cuirassiers in the procession escorting the remains of 
Rouget de 1'Isle, Paris 



A NEW PARIS OF OLD MEMORIES 

ence. I found myself watching for it. I finally 
became accustomed to it and it bothered me no more 
than the occasional honk honk of a taxi in the 
Champs Elysees or the restless hum just before 
dawn as the city stirs before it awakes. 

The automobile agent in Paris to whom we had 
been referred was eager to rent us a car. With it, 
he thought, we might get as far as Versailles, Ver- 
sailles being distant from Paris about eight miles. 
We found later from those in authority that we 
might with proper passports motor into the south- 
ern provinces — through the Midi or along the Ri- 
viera. But motor toward the battle front on the 
north or east — never. Not even with a military 
chauffeur, and the military chauffeurs had been 
mobilized long since. Thus within a few hours our 
well-laid plans were completely upset. It was evi- 
dent that while the French War Office was glad of 
American sympathy it looked upon the confusion 
of the German invaders as a more pressing matter 
than the granting of privileges to American cor- 
respondents. 

After our mission had become known and while 
Johnson, pursuing another tack, was busy with the 
heads of bureaus looking for our authorisation, 

21 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

there came to our hotel ambitious young motorists 
eager to escort us up to the front. They placed 
their cars at our disposal — provided they could go 
along to drive us. Some of them had served as 
ambulance or dispatch bearers during the early 
days of the war. They still carried their little pink 
driving licenses. But they were useless now be- 
cause, as the vast organization back of the lines be- 
came systematized, only chauffeurs regularly mobi- 
lized in the French army were allowed in the auto- 
mobile service. 

The days of waiting that followed our arrival 
were quiet but not uneventful. While negotiations 
proceeded we lived in a state of uncertainty, for at 
any moment word might come from the War Of- 
fice that would send us up to the front. There were 
many times in this well-ordered city that it was 
impossible to comprehend the situation — to realize 
that an invading army was being held in check on 
a long front whose nearest point was less than two 
hours' distance away by automobile. 

During this period of anticipation, we came to 
know a new Paris, a Paris bereft of its gaiety and 
frivolity, a city of a great resolve and of a lofty and 
unconquerable spirit. If on the surface there were 

22 



A NEW PARIS OF OLD MEMORIES 

few material changes, it was in the inner conscious- 
ness of the city that a greater change had taken 
place. We noticed this particularly in the hotels. 
One had a feeling that a soul had crept into their 
empty shells and that those of us who lived in them 
were no longer strangers but shared with this peo- 
ple a common menace and united in a common 
prayer that France might win in the great struggle 
for her independence. 

The Americans in Paris were not now clamoring 
for money and government escort home. The rab- 
ble that stormed the embassy doors at the outbreak 
of the war had long since returned and in its place 
were citizens of another type. Some were salesmen 
for various American munition and motor truck 
factories, but the majority were here for a less ma- 
terial purpose, to serve in the American Ambulance 
at Neuilly, in the various branch hospitals in the 
provinces, in the relief clearing houses and in count- 
less other ways that Americans have adopted of 
showing where their sympathies lie. Architects 
graduated from the Beaux Arts and painters from 
the different ateliers had not forgotten the debt 
they owed to France for her inspiration and en- 
couragement. And surgeons, physicians, nurses 

23 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

and women of wealth were giving their services to 
lessen the suffering caused by the war. 

These men and women have done much to main- 
tain a balance in France. Their generosity and 
unselfishness have offset in the eyes of the people 
the feeble policies of a government that has done 
everything in its power to shatter American pres- 
tige and the ideals for which American patriotism 
has stood. 

There was a charming view from my window. 
In the foreground the blooming chestnuts with their 
lush foliage, on either hand the wide stretches of 
the Champs Elysees, in the distance beyond the 
Avenue Montaigne and the river the lofty skeleton 
of the Eiffel Tower. On the Espagne in mid ocean 
we received news of the world and the daily com- 
munique of the War Office from the Eiffel Tower. 
Its wireless is of vital importance and they guard 
the Tower carefully. Mitrailleuses are mounted on 
the platforms and a guard of soldiers is stationed 
around the base. There are also mitrailleuses in 
place of the statuary that formerly crowned the 
Arc de Triomphe at the top of the Champs Ely- 
sees. A friend of ours, a nurse at Neuilly, who 
lives close to the Arch, says that on the night of the 

24 



y 




A NEW PARIS OF OLD MEMORIES 

Zeppelin raid there was an infernal racket from 
the machine guns trying to pot the cigar-shaped 
intruder in the sky. She felt that the whole war 
was being fought out just beyond her bedroom 
window. 

The other day a yellow dirigible flew about the 
Eiffel Tower, then pointed its nose upward, hung 
above in the sky for a while and sailed off toward 
the flying field at Buc. This, I think, was the day 
that Warneford lost his life at Buc. He had de- 
stroyed a Zeppelin single-handed and was being 
lionized in Paris. After luncheon with a number 
of friends at the Ritz he drove away in his motor. 
Two hours later word came in by telephone that 
his machine had buckled under him and that he and 
his guest, the American correspondent Needham, 
had been killed. 

We missed the long procession of fashionable 
vehicles in the Champs Elysees, en route to the 
Bois. In its place an occasional gray motor passes, 
or a taxicab, or a lumbering horse-drawn bus filled 
with convalescent wounded out for an airing. The 
Avenue d'Antin leads into the Rond Point on our 
right. Out of it at times come regiments of infan- 
try changing barracks, or, in full equipment, march- 

n 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

ing to a railway station to entrain for the front. 
Again a Red- Cross ambulance dashes out of the 
street and across the open place. Its destination 
also is the railway station but its mission is to carry 
back the wounded. Spahi soldiers, distinguished 
by their picturesque costumes and lofty hats, or 
poilus in red kepis and long light blue coats, amble 
about beneath the trees. Their legs are bandaged 
or their arms are in slings and they walk with the 
help of crutches and canes. Some of them bask in 
the sun on the benches or stand in the crowd with 
the children further down the avenue in front of the 
Guignol. 

Many of the great hotels of the neighborhood — 
the Elysee Palace, Astoria and Hotel d'lena — have 
been converted into hospitals and fly the flag of the 
other Allies — Russia, Japan and Great Britain. 

The spirit of sympathy and consideration that 
prevails throughout the city holds even the taxi 
drivers in its grip. I was standing one day on an 
island of safety in front of the Madeleine. A con- 
valescent soldier, with emaciated cheeks, pale face 
and using a heavy stick as a prop to his bandaged 
leg, was crossing in front of me. A long file of 
taxis bore down on him from the Boulevard des 

28 



A NEW PARIS OF OLD MEMORIES 

Capucines. This man, who had braved the big 
guns and shrapnel of the trenches, stood panic- 
stricken, frightened and irresolute. The leading 
taxi came to a dead stop and the long procession 
of vehicles behind it followed suit. The driver 
beckoned to the soldier and said soothingly, as he 
might speak to a child, "Allez done! mon enfant!" 
And the line waited patiently until the invalid had 
crossed over to the opposite curb. 

The streets and shops of Paris! What stories 
you will yield up when the great war is over and 
there are abler pens than mine to tell them ! 

With Charles Butler, the architect, back in Paris 
to work in the American Relief and be near his old 
comrades of the Beaux Arts, I went into an art 
shop in the neighborhood of the school to buy some 
materials. There were no young clerks, they were 
all mobilise. The good woman in charge of the 
shop showed us a letter just received from an in- 
fantry sergeant in a prison camp "somewhere in 
France." He enclosed a long list of water-color 
supplies, carefully made out in a hand like copper- 
plate — Whatman board, brushes, paints and eras- 
ers — that were to be sent to him for one of his pris- 
oners. The prisoner was an Austrian nobleman 

29 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

and was very triste, he said. He was an amateur 
painter and the water-color sketches would serve to 
pass the long, monotonous daj^s in the camp. He, 
the sergeant, would be personally responsible for 
the payment of the account. 

On another occasion, I went with Butler into a 
small lithographer's shop in the Rue Madame. For 
days I had been searching Paris for a certain kind 
of paper that comes from Austria — twice before I 
had found the same shop closed. Now a bell tinkled 
inside, a bolt was shot back and the door opened 
slowly. A man of middle age appeared out of the 
darkness and asked us to enter. He limped slightly 
and was timid and nervous. He seemed to crave 
company. We rummaged through long drawers for 
the paper we wanted and among the shelves for 
crayons and ink. The man took us about the shop. 
The presses and work tables were carefully dusted, 
the stools for the men in place, the dabbers and 
rollers were ready to hand as though they had just 
dropped them and might return at any moment to 
pick them up again. But there was no one at all in 
sight. Except for the caretaker and his cat the 
shop was deserted and as quiet as a tomb. A ray of 
sunshine crept through a crack and touched with 

30 



A NEW PARIS OF OLD MEMORIES 

scarlet some geraniums on the window sill. This 
was the only note of color, it was a place of deep 
shadows, a place strangely peopled with ghosts. 
The spirits of these absent men seemed to hover 
about the empty spaces. We did not have to be 
told where they were. 

The patron had been killed at Charleroi in the 
early days of the war. Of the fourteen employes 
four had fallen since, three had been wounded and 
were convalescing in hospitals and the others were 
with the troops in the trenches about Arras. The 
caretaker himself had been wounded. When he 
was discharged from the hospital he had returned 
to open the shop. It had been a lonely vigil during 
the long gray winter days, he said, when he could 
only stare at the empty work tables. And when he 
half closed his eyes he could see dimly the figures 
of the men struggling under the murderous fire of 
the German guns on Notre Dame de Lorette. He 
looked for four o'clock each afternoon when he 
might shut the doors and dreaded opening them 
again in the morning. But now June had come, 
the chestnuts were in bloom, there was life in the 
streets and bright color in the Luxembourg gar- 
dens. And France, with her high ideals, her glori- 

33 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

ous history, her art, her literature and the fearful 
sacrifice that she was making that the country 
might be saved for posterity, France would win. 
All this he told us — very simply. And when the 
war was over, those that were left of the men would 
come back and they would start the presses of the 
lithographer's shop in the Rue Madame. 

The Latin quarter of these nights was the Paris 
of Francois Villon, poet, student and burglar. The 
narrow twisting streets were unlighted except for 
the mellow glow from an occasional shop window. 
One can picture Villon as he hurries to the Pestle 
to empty the purse he has just stolen at another 
favorite haunt, the Mule. It needed only the flar- 
ing flambeaux sticking out from the walls or the 
iron baskets filled with pitch knots to reanimate the 
shade of a maker of immortal laughter, another 
Francois, surnamed Rabelais. Through these dark 
alleys, one may sense the roaming spirit of the 
greatest love maker that a nation supreme in love 
making ever produced, Louis Francois, Due de 
Richelieu, as he steals to a rendezvous with some 
fragile marquise. A few years later he might have 
passed that prince of adventurers, Maurice de Saxe, 
upon his way to Adrienne Lecouvreur. It was soon 

34 



A NEW PARIS OF OLD MEMORIES 

after the news of such a visit reached the ears of the 
Duchesse de Bouillon, also an adorer of the irre- 
sistible Maurice, that a mysterious death set free 
the soul of Adrienne. She was denied a resting 
place in consecrated ground and through these same 
shadows rumbled the cart in which a few devoted 
friends carried her body to a nameless grave in a 
field where now stands the mansion at No. 115, Rue 
de Grenelle. 

Cartouche, the master thief of France, glides by 
wrapped in the cloak to which he gave his name and 
beneath it hides a bit of plunder the theft of which 
will set all Paris laughing to-morrow. It is the 
rapier of the Regent, Philippe d'Orleans, and its 
hilt is a mass of precious stones. Another and as 
great a villain follows him. He is the Count Cagl- 
iostro bringing his charms and incantations to some 
rich dupe in one of the great houses of the Fau- 
bourg St. Germain. Follow later Jean Jacques 
Rousseau and his inexplicable Therese Le Vasseur, 
the Reverend Laurence Sterne in search of the po- 
litely improper, the young Voltaire hurrying to his 
room in the Green Basket, the royal policeman, La 
Reynie, coming to escort another titled prisoner to 
the Bastille for participation in the Affair of the 

35 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

Poisons. Turn from the memories of this famous 
company, look upward, and one is brought back 
with a start to present-day reality. Through the 
gabled roofs and toppling chimneys on either side 
that struggle to meet overhead a solitary light 
moves slowly across the sky. It is the light of an 
aeroplane on watch over Paris. 

One night we drove over to Lavenue's. Shades 
of Stevenson and Henley, what a change was here ! 
Even the habitues of our later day were scattered 
— Harrison, Ned Simmons, Dicky Brooks, Bob 
Aitken, Gilbert White, Walden. Gone were the 
students that went only to the Petit Lavenue when 
the check came from home. Gone were the Ameri- 
can gourmets that frequented the Jardin and al- 
ways tipped the head waiter — gone to Cairo or 
Newport or California were the slender beauties 
that sometimes graced the Terrasse. In their 
places were the omnipresent military and a few trav- 
elers from the provinces just arrived at the Gare 
Montparnasse. Lavenue's seemed deserted. The 
ubiquitous Monsieur Baer was in evidence and as 
hospitable as ever, but Schumacher, of the glorious 
violin, was not. He had refused many offers to 
come to America. He preferred his clientele in 

36 



A NEW PARIS OF OLD MEMORIES 

the cafe. It was an artistic clientele and artists had 
souls. None of them would ever be stirred by 
Schumacher's violin again. He had returned to 
Germany to join his regiment and had been killed 
in action months before. 

We recognized few familiar faces among the 
employes. Owen Johnson asked our waiter how 
old he was. He had seventeen years, he admitted 
shamefacedly, and his assistant, the omnibus, was 
one year his junior. Young to be a waiter, true, but 
the sommellier had seventy-five years. Seventeen 
and seventy-five ! And the men of fighting age in 
between were all gone — they too were in the Artois 
sector or in the trenches above the Aisne. 

A drizzle of rain was falling as we went out. I 
thought of those other nights when I had been at 
Lavenue's and looked out over the place in the rain. 
The outlines of the buses and tram cars, of the 
market carts and lamp posts and pedestrians were 
reflected in irregular snake-like spirals down to the 
curb at my feet. I had thought often what an 
amusing composition it would make in color, but 
everything was keyed in a gray green monotone 
to-night. I was only faintly interested when John- 
son reminded me of the time the locomotive ran 

39 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

wild, broke through the wall of the Gare Mont- 
parnasse and hung suspended from the second story- 
over the pavement. My thoughts were with Schu- 
macher and his violin or in the trenches with the 
men from the lithographer's shop in the Rue 
Madame. 

Further along the Boulevard is the Cafe du 
Dome. We strolled on to it through the mist for a 
demitasse. Here too a host of memories held me. 
I thought of Augustus Thomas and Doctor Rob- 
bins with their apartments above the cafe and the 
large bow windows at the apex of the triangle that 
reminded one of the spacious pilot house of a Mis- 
sissippi River steamer. Thomas said he always had 
to check an inclination to stand at the wheel in the 
bow window and steer the apartment in safety past 
the snags in the Boulevard. Thomas and Robbins 
long since returned to America. There was no 
poker game in the back of the cafe. There was no 
Billy Hereford or Harry Leon Wilson or "Tark" 
or Julian Street or Berkeley Smith. While we sat 
under the dripping canvas on the sidewalk I 
thought of this coterie on the afternoon that we ad- 
journed to the cafe following the famous one-round 
knock-out in the sacred precincts of Whistler's 

40 



A NEW PARIS OF OLD MEMORIES 

studio. I thought of that evening years ago when 
I arrived in Paris from Italy with my first motor 
car. I was unable to find a garage and left it in 
front of the "Dome" and rose at intervals through 
the night to peer through the windows of the hotel 
across the street and assure myself that it was still 
safe. Other times other customs. Joseph, who 
guarded it that night, has been gone long since. 
Eugene, too, is mobilise. There were strange wait- 
ers in the cafe, strange faces behind the caisse and 
strange patrons in place of the friends I had known. 
The day following the episode of the car I found 
a garage in the Rue Vaugirard. I patronized it 
ever afterward even though I personally aban- 
doned the quarter and lived in a hotel in the Rue de 
Rivoli. On my arrival in Paris on my last motor 
tour in France, two years before, I had left orders 
that the car be washed and made ready for an early 
start. The next day when I was fifty miles out of 
Paris on my way to Havre to catch the steamer a 
rainstorm set in. I discovered that I had no side 
curtains. They had been taken out while the car 
was being washed and overlooked in the hurry of 
departure. During one of these days of waiting it 
occurred to me that I would call at the Garage 

41 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

Coger to renew my acquaintance with the patron 
and incidentally to get my side curtains. 

I arrived at an inopportune moment. The pa- 
tron was standing in the courtyard in the uniform of 
an infantry regiment of the line. He was buckling 
on his accoutrements. "You see," he said, smiling, 
"I am a soldier now, not a mechanicien, I served at 
the Marne, then I was given leave of absence. But 
I've been ordered out again, our regiment starts for 
the Arras sector to-night." 

He looked behind him with a brave show of con- 
fidence. His five little girls stood in the doorway, 
each one year taller than the other, like a ladder. 
In the shadow of the doorway stood his wife. She 
had been crying but her face was now calm and 
white. In it was that spiritual look that we noticed 
in the faces of many of the French women, that ex- 
pression of a lofty ideal and a great sacrifice. It 
must be, I imagine, the same spirit that animated 
the women of the South in the Civil War and the 
American women in the Revolution. To be ordered 
to the Arras sector means being sent into the thick- 
est of the fighting, into the zone of greatest danger 
in the western area. The garage keeper's wife 
stepped down and helped adjust the cross straps 

42 



A NEW PARIS OF OLD MEMORIES 

over her husband's shoulders while the youngest of 
the little girls, uncomprehending, hid in the folds 
of her skirts. I shook hands with the husband, 
saluted, and wished him "bon chance." As I left 
the wife, still composed, smiled bravely and waved 
her hand. 

I saw her again the following Sunday in the Lux- 
embourg Gardens. There was music by the Con- 
cert Rouge under the trees, naval engagements of 
tragic importance were occurring in the basin where 
yachts with bright colored sails of orange or white 
or red were drawn into the vortex of the flowing 
fountain or colliding with disastrous results in mid- 
pool. She was very calm and her troop of girls, 
with small understanding of the battle that was be- 
ing fought on this peaceful June Sunday some fifty 
miles outside of Paris, were intently watching the 
toy yachts in the basin. Beyond the chimney pots 
on the houses that rise above the chestnuts lining 
the Boul' Miche' an aeroplane hovered in the great 
bowl of the sky. It was a sight so common that 
the children paid no attention to it. It came nearer, 
like a war eagle high above the house tops, circled 
the gardens and swept off in the direction of Ver- 
sailles. 

45 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

"Our men guard us well, Monsieur," said the 
wife of the garage keeper. "No, there is no news 
from the front, as yet — but no news is good news," 
she added hopefully. And her confidence inspired 
me to feel that all was well about Arras. Ah, you 
women of France, to what lofty heights of patriot- 
ism and supreme self-abnegation have you lifted 
yourselves, what an example of devotion and heroic 
resolve you are affording the women of the world ! 

I am reminded for the first time as I write this 
that one of my objects in going to the Rue Vau- 
girard was to recover my side curtains. For all 
I know to the contrary my side curtains are still in 
the Rue Vaugirard. 



46 



CHAPTER III 

A MOTOR TOUR TO RHEIMS AND THE CHAMPAGNE 

DISTRICT 

After days of waiting that seemed like weeks, 
the much-coveted permission to go to the front came 
unexpectedly. Johnson burst upon my medita- 
tions at the Cafe des Gauff res one afternoon and 
rushed with me over to the War Office. Followed 
the displaying of passports and signing of papers 
— then behold extraordinary photographs taken by 
a local expert that made us look like two exhibits 
from the Rogue's Gallery. These were affixed to 
two little yellow cards and we received our author- 
isation to the th Army Corps in the Rheims 

sector and the valley of the Aisne. 

It was planned at first to make the entire tour by 
motor. But at the last moment this was changed 
and we commenced the initial stage of the journey 
— to Epernay — by rail. From this point until we 
took train back to Paris from Chateau-Thierry 
the tour was under the escort and direction of the 

47 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

army and was accomplished in long gray army au- 
tomobiles of divers makes and extraordinary speed 
and power. 

A captain of the general staff took charge of us 
on the station platform in the morning. With him 
was another officer of lesser rank. Let me pay here 

my little tribute to Captain X , who proves 

again that a sportsman in times of peace makes a 
gallant and chivalrous officer in the more serious 
game of war. 

I remember of old the "Waters Express," the 
fast train that left the Gare de l'Est and whisked 
its passengers down in short order to the cures of 
the Vosges — Contrexeville, Vittel, Plombieres. 
Now it seemed little changed — rather more 
crowded and with a preponderance of gold lace and 
uniforms of the new Joffre blue. But there were 
the same prosperous-looking merchants going to 
Nancy, the same corpulent ladies with dogs en route 
to Vittel, and the same nervous little maitre dfhotel 
who dealt us out tickets for the first or second sit- 
ting at dejeuner. 

Meaux passed — a blur of broken walls and train 
sheds where the German drive began to crumple at 
the Battle of the Marne; splotches of dark blue 

48 






■3* *-&+*, 




At staff headquarters in the Aisne valley. 



A MOTOR TOUR TO RHEIMS 

above red breeches were silhouetted against the sky 
where the Territorials guarded the railway line. 
Yellow fields swept by with rusty barbed-wire en- 
tanglements showing above the grain — sometimes a 
mound with a cross of twigs or a little patch of 
flowers. 

At Epernay there were more staff officers to 
meet us and four waiting automobiles ; an open pilot 
car, a truck for the luggage, and limousines up- 
holstered in whipcord. In the one to which Arnold 
Bennett and I were assigned were calling card case, 
clock, vanity box, and a cut-glass vase for flowers, 
exactly as though my lady had just left it. But my 
lady did not leave the two carbines slung across on 
straps within easy reach. Our reception left a bus- 
inesslike impression. There was no fuss, no delay, 
everything worked apparently as a small part of a 
most efficient organization. The chauffeurs took 
our valises. On our return that night we found 
them carefully marked and placed in our several 
rooms in the hotels upon which we were billeted. 

Clouds of dust followed in our wake as the cars 
rushed out of Epernay, brushing by commissar}'' 
wagons loaded with bread and provisions, ammuni- 
tion caissons lumbering along the roadside, or sol- 

51 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

diers loitering in the doorways. We halted at a 
bridge for the password. On the left, stretching 
away in a gentle curve to the northwest, was the 
tree-bordered Marne Canal, its mirrorlike reflec- 
tions little suggesting the chaos and confusion when 
Von Kluck's legions were rolled back across its 
placid waters by d'Esperey's Fifth Army Corps 
last September. Then Marfaux. It is a little vil- 
lage like the hundreds dotting the plain of Cham- 
pagne. The shells of houses and the toppling 
chimneys brought me face to face for the first time 
with the dreadful thing that has befallen France. 
There was not a rooftree standing in the hamlet, 
gaping doors and windows stared at us and gaunt, 
broken walls full of shot holes reared themselves 
above masses of crumbled debris. Of its inhabitants 
only the schoolmaster with his wife and two small 
children remained. The Germans, he said, had been 
pleasant enough on their victorious march to Paris. 
But on the retreat! He held up his hands: he 
pointed to the houses of the village. 

We called on a division commander — he was 
quartered in a pretty chateau with a peaceful gar- 
den and graveled walks. Our party of correspond- 
ents consisted of Owen Johnson, Arnold Bennett, 

52 



A MOTOR TOUR TO RHEIMS 

George Mair, and the writer. The commander was 
very cordial and gave orders that we should be al- 
lowed every opportunity for observation. 

Soon after leaving headquarters we were dodg- 
ing and twisting through narrow lanes. We were 
getting nearer to the zone of fire, and the chauf- 
feurs knew the value of protecting walls and 
hedges. We climbed a little hill through an avenue 
of trees, the leafy foliage forming a canopy above, 
and stopped in the stable yard of another chateau. 
A short walk past the chapel — with a large shell 
hole in its wall and near by a cavity where a giant 
marmite had exploded in the shrubbery — and we 
reached a terrace. From this vantage point the 
whole beautiful Aisne Valley lay spread out before 
us. Vineyards and fields in the foreground, wind- 
ing roads with sentinel-like trees, wooded copses, 
the glint of a stream — the landscape shimmering 
in the June sunshine. It was our first view of the 
battlefields of the Champagne district. In the dis- 
tance to the right were the wooded slopes of the 
Argonne Forest. Nearer was the ruined village of 
Suippes, about which has centered some of the bit- 
terest fighting in the western area. 

The flat plain of the Champs de Chalons — the 

53 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

practice ground of the French army, and the field 
upon which most of the early airmen (Latham, 
Bleriot, Farman, and Lorraine) learned to fly — 
lay beyond the banks of the Vesle. Close to it was 
their old headquarters, the battered village of Mour- 
melon-le-Grand. Crisscrossing the landscape were 
countless roads : broad highways or smaller chemins 
de communications. There was nothing moving on 
them — even under the glasses there was nothing 
living in sight. 

Stretching from east to west, framed in by the 
trees beneath the ridge, ran a long white line, 
broken sometimes where it disappeared beyond a 
knoll — the French trenches. Further away, ex- 
tending across the whole stage from one proscenium 
arch to the other, a second white scar marked the 
German positions on the Craonne plateau. The 
land beyond that second white scar was also 
France, that part of manufacturing and coal-bear- 
ing France that is now in the hands of the enemy. 
A puff of white smoke arose — shrapnel. A yellow 
cloud showed where an explosive shell came in con- 
tact with something. Other white puffs appeared 
further away on the slope, but there was no sound 
of firing — the wind was behind us and it was so 

54 




Entrance to the deserted Chateau Fere d'Isly 



A MOTOR TOUR TO RHEIMS 

quiet in the drowsy sunshine that we could hear the 
hum of insect life in the garden. 

We walked on a few yards — then looked to the 
northwest. Rheims lay basking in the sunlight, the 
twin towers of the cathedral and the broken chim- 
neys silhouetted against the clear sky. 

It was only yesterday, I thought, since I had last 
driven my car from Metz eastward over that same 
white ribbon of road to Rheims. Now the road lay 
almost midway between the French and German 
positions and was daily swept by a murderous shell 
fire. And the cathedral! But with the naked eye 
the damage done to it from this distance was negli- 
gible. The roof was partly gone. Except for this 
the graceful outlines were unchanged. The towers 
and belfries still soared majestically above the town, 
apparently undaunted by the engines of war now 
sweeping the wide expanse of the Aisne and Vesle 
Valleys. Brought nearer under the field glasses we 
could see plainly the great white scar on the facade 
where the stone became calcined by the flames that 
followed the first bombardment by the Germans on 
the seventeenth of September, 1914. 

We had some difficulty getting closer to Rheims. 
The chauffeurs were for going directly down the 

57 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

hill and meeting the main road to the city below. 
They were ordered back by our staff captain. "I 
am not responsible for you correspondents," he 
said, "but I must be careful of my own men." 

That thought for the men was always uppermost. 
A sudden shower as we slipped through country by- 
ways found only one of our chauffeurs with a rain- 
coat. The Captain offered his own to the other. 
We made a detour to avoid the exposed portion of 
the road — then a short dash into Rheims. Nearing 
the town gates we called on the brigade commander, 
a fine grizzled type like one of our old Indian fight- 
ers — such as Lawton or Crook. His quarters were 
not imposing — the four bare walls of a low-ceil- 
inged office room, dingy windows, large-scale maps, 
plans and official papers strewn over a table; the 
clump of the hob-nailed boots of the sentries in the 
hall outside and the tinkle of a telephone bell in the 
adjoining room as reports came in from distant bat- 
teries raking the Aisne Valley. The staff captain 
who took us in charge said he had followed on the 
heels of the Germans when they were driven out 
last September and that on one occasion since, over 
three thousand shells had been fired into the city 
during the short space of twenty-four hours. 

58 



A MOTOR TOUR TO RHEIMS 

That was easy enough to understand once we 
had reached the cathedral and the devastated dis- 
trict behind it. What had appeared from a dis- 
tance to be minor damage became real havoc on 
closer acquaintance. On the splendid west front 
the hundreds of little statues set in their niches are 
all damaged, some minus hands and legs and arms 
and others swept away entirely. The stained glass 
of the great rose window is wrecked, many of the 
columns supporting the smaller arches twisted or 
cracked by the fierce heat, the gargoyles shot off 
and the splendid portals — inside and out — so badly 
damaged that it is unlikely they can ever be re- 
stored. 

The white scar that sweeps up the northwest 
tower tells better than words the graphic story of 
shell fire and conflagration. It is one of the won- 
ders of the world that Rheims Cathedral, dese- 
crated, shot at continually for months, preserves 
its majesty unimpaired, its towers rising undaunted 
above the grass-grown cobbles of the square serene 
and unconquerable. 

On one side of the place the Grand Hotel has a 
hole in its second story big enough to accommodate 
the traditional coach and four. The hotel awak- 

59 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

ened old memories. I thought of it as I had known 
it in the early days of aviation when Farman and 
Lorraine and Cockburn made it their quarters and 
the courtyard echoed the explosions of the motors 
coming in at all hours from the flying field of Beth- 
any. Now a ditch extends across the flying field of 
Bethany. In front of it are barbed wire entangle- 
ments and chevaux-de-frise and in its shadows are 
men in Joffre blue with rifles and hand grenades 
who burrow further into its depths when they hear 
the warning crackle of a shell from the direction of 
the Craonne Plateau. 

On the other side of the place is the Hotel Lion 
d'Or. Gone is its American bar and the little 
French-Canadian who made the only worth-while 
cocktail in France outside of Paris. The windows 
are gaping holes — the shutters blown away. There 
is debris heaped up in the rooms and courtyard and 
the walls are punctured with holes where the shells 
have ricochetted off the cobbled pavement. 

Back of the cathedral is a dreary waste. Houses 
gutted, outer walls swiped off as though a curtain 
had been raised in a theater showing the intimate 
interior — the wall paper of the different rooms, the 
broken rafters, fragments of beds and tables, fire- 

60 



A MOTOR TOUR TO RHEIMS 

places, bric-a-brac and tattered curtains blowing in 
the wind. The Rue de l'Universite, the Rue des 
Cordeliers, the Rue Eugene Desteuque looked like 
the streets of Salem after the fire. In many cases 
the people insist on returning to their homes. One 
little old lady was calmly knitting in the broken 
doorway of her house though the corner of it was 
crushed back like the bow of an ocean steamship 
after a collision. 

Of all the devastation in or near the cathedral 
only Dubois' statue of Joan d'Arc in front of the 
Great Doors is, as yet, untouched. The legs of the 
horse are chipped by fragments of flying shells, but 
the Maid rides serenely above. In her hands she 
holds the tricolor and at the foot of the pedestal are 
wreaths and fresh flowers — the people of Rheims 
look upon her invulnerability as a good omen. 

Military necessity is a fearful thing. In our own 
Civil War it was the excuse for laying waste the 
prosperous region through which Sherman marched 
to the sea, for the bombardment of Charleston, 
Mobile and Vicksburg and for numerous hardships 
inflicted on the civil population by both sides. In 
the war of 1812 the British shelled the new capital 
at Washington and pillaged the town. Yet through 

63 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

all the wars that have ravaged France and Belgium 
their historic monuments have been respected. In 
this great war there has been more wilful devasta- 
tion on the part of the Germans than in all the 
others that have swept Europe since the days of the 
Huns and Vandals. 

Rheims, Soissons, Senlis, Albert, Arras, Ypres, 
Louvain, Malines, Dixmude ! What a list ! What 
a refutation of the idea that civilization has ad- 
vanced or that German Kultur of the twentieth cen- 
tury is an improvement upon the barbarism of the 
middle ages! 

Returning to Epernay for the night through the 
dusk, we passed companies of infantry moving up 
to relieve those at the front — the French trenches 
at Bethany are only a little over a mile outside of 
Rheims — and motor transports and wagons waiting 
at the depots to carry up their supplies to the lines 
under cover of the darkness. We spent a restless 
night in an uncomfortable little hotel kept by a 
very pretty landlady. There was a glow in the sky 
over Rheims, and through the wakeful hours 
sounded the drone of an aeroplane on patrol duty 
over the town. 

Our staff captain waked me at dawn. Through 

64 



A MOTOR TOUR TO RHEIMS 

a crisp, dewy morning we drove back over the same 
road to Rheims. There was some doubt about our 
being allowed to pass into the town. The French 
had captured some trenches in the Argonne and 
the Germans had retaliated by a Sunday-morning 
bombardment of the cathedral — the shelling had 
commenced at daybreak. After a little discussion 
our Indian fighter of the day before relented and 
we motored on through streets profoundly silent. 
The afternoon before we had driven directly up to 
the open place in front of the cathedral. This time 
we left the cars in a side street near at hand behind 
the shelter of protecting walls. 

Borne down on the wind, which had changed to 
the northwest, was the crackle of artillery fire and 
the noise of explosive shells from the Plateau and 
the Valley. We walked about the cathedral. A 
six-inch shell had dropped in the little sheltered 
spot in the rear and torn a hole in the ground — 
except for this the salvo was without result. We 
went inside. Sainsalieu, the architect, and the oth- 
ers did not remove their hats. I wondered why. It 
was because the sanctuary had been violated and the 
sacrament removed; the great cathedral was no 
longer a house of God. It was Sunday morning, 

65 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

but there were no services, no priests intoning the 
mass, no heavy roll of the organ — only the echo of 
our muffled voices in the vaulted spaces above. 

Sainsalieu, who has been working steadily inside 
the building on his plans for its restoration through 
so many weeks of bombardment that the whistle of 
shells means nothing to him, gave me his chair and 
table to aid me in my drawing. Then he gave me 
a key. The cathedral is carefully locked up at all 
times. There is a gate in the fence beyond the sand 
bags that protect the sculpture at the base of the 
building and a small wooden door in place of the 
heavy one in the right portal. The same key opens 
both, and also another little door on the right as you 
enter. This little inside door is as tempting as the 
one that led to Bluebeard's closet for his headless 
wives. I was asked to give my word of honor that 
I would not open it, for it leads to the stairway 
that climbs up through the southwest tower to the 
roof. No one is allowed on the roof, so careful are 
the French authorities that the Germans shall not 
be given the slightest excuse for bombarding the 
building under the pretext that it is being used for 
observation purposes. 

Sainsalieu made me promise not to give the key to 

66 



A MOTOR TOUR TO RHEIMS 

any one, but to keep it until I met him at dejeuner 
at a certain hotel. Then he went with the others to 
Bethany and I locked myself in. It was awesomely 
quiet within the great building as I went on with 
my work. The desultory fire of the guns to the 
north was muffled. It was apparently no more 
threatening than the cooing of the pigeons in the 
vast dome overhead. There was a flutter of wings 
when a shell exploded in the direction of the Place 
Royale, and I started when a shower of glass, 
loosened from its setting by the wind, crashed down 
on the flagstones of the nave. This was the only 
interruption. When I left I carefully locked the 
door, then I closed the gate and locked it behind 
me. A man who had been apparently waiting out- 
side asked me for the key to the cathedral. Remem- 
bering my promise, I refused to give it to him. He 
was willing enough to engage me in conversation, 
but this was no place, I thought, for a parley. The 
parvis was strangely silent and except for us two, 
deserted. There was an impressive stillness in the 
town, the midday lull in the firing while both sides 
were at dinner ; but there was never any telling when 
the racket might start up again. 

I went on through lonely streets, past houses 

69 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

with broken shutters, windows agape, walls spat- 
tered with shot holes and chimneys leaning precari- 
ously over the street to the rendezvous at the Hotel 

, the only hotel now open in Rheims. Sain- 

salieu was not there. We were almost through 
luncheon when a hasty courier arrived in the person 
of a boy on a bicycle who, clothed with the proper 
authority, begged that the American gentleman 
give him the key to the cathedral. 



70 



CHAPTER IV 

IN THE AISNE VALLEY 

Afternoon found us scooting along the road to 
Soissons, the same route nationale I had known in 
my motor-tours that had carried me westward to 
Compiegne, Beauvais, Rouen, and Havre. Long 
lines of poplars shot by in a blur; the roar of the 
motor echoed in the swish, swish as we rushed past 
the boles of the trees. A flock of sheep turned out 
of a lane, an incongruously peaceful note in an at- 
mosphere of big guns and destruction. We left the 
main road shortly, and edged our way toward the 
front through protected byways or between the 
walls of old, gray villages. We climbed a slope, 
interviewed another brigade commander, left the 
cars in a protected place, and walked into the depths 
of a thickly wooded forest. From the outside it 
looked peaceful enough — a mass of dark green on 
a ridge above a slumbering hamlet. There was 
nothing to suggest that within its shadows bristling 
guns were sunken in well-concealed emplacements, 

71 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

that the heavy foliage hid the position of the st 

Battery of Artillery. They had the usual comple- 
ment of "75's," with an anti-air-craft gun and a 
huge "caterpillar," with its gray nose pointed down 
into the ground to avoid detection by the watchful 
Germans on the hills beyond. 

The stables were cunningly hidden in the thick 
of the wood. The stalls were covered with green 
boughs. The battery has been in the same position 
since last November, and every horse had its name 
over the stall, like an old-time fire-engine house in 
New York — LeBeau, Victoire, L'Hermite, Marie 
Louise. 

The quarters of the men were in well-protected 
underground huts covered with timbers and sap- 
lings. They had rough sketches on the walls and 
flowers in vases. In cages were magpies and small 
song-birds, and a musician had rigged up a xylo- 
phone by hanging wine-bottles containing different 
amounts of water on a sapling suspended between 
two trees. On this he played selections from the 
operas. Near by, almost at his feet, was the grave 
of one of his comrades. 

On the grave were fresh flowers and a wreath, and 
an inscription roughly cut with a knife on a piece 

72 




3 



Ph 



IN THE AISNE VALLEY 

of board, "Francois, our friend, dead on the field of 
honor." The artilleryman tinkled the "William 
Tell" overture on his musical glasses. He wore a 
tight-fitting" jacket like a Zouave's, and as I stood 
listening to his concert I was reminded of that 
splendid story of the Zouaves I had just heard in 
Paris. A regiment of them overreached itself in a 
charge in the Argonne. It was cut off by the 
enemy, and virtually wiped out. The Germans, 
adopting tactics that have been unheard of in mod- 
ern warfare, costumed themselves in the uniforms 
of the dead men. As they moved back to attack 
the French lines, they pushed a few of the sur- 
vivors in front of them. From the trenches the 
missing regiment of Zouaves appeared, straggling 
along the hillside. It closed in until, as it was al- 
most upon them, the French heard a voice from the 
advancing host shout, "In the name of God ! Fire !" 

The name of the soldier who died in the volley 
from his own lines is unknown. His exploit was 
read to the army in the orders of the day. 

It was a quiet afternoon along this part of the 
front. It was quiet, rather, until, as we were look- 
ing at a blue-gray "75," with its muzzle pointed out 
of a bough of leaves, an order came by telephone, 

75 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

and a shell was slipped into the timing mechanism. 
A dial was set ; in a few seconds the shell was with- 
drawn and locked in the breech of the gun, and an 
officer pulled a lanyard. There was a report — not 
so loud a report as I had expected — a whiff of 
smoke came from the breech, and the shell had gone 
on its mission to an invisible enemy beyond the 
slope, while the leaves overhead, hiding the gray 
muzzle, settled back into place. 

I read the story of a correspondent who boasted 
that five shells were fired for his special benefit. 
I prefer to think that this one was fired for 
France. 

A hot and dusty walk and we descended into a 
little village. In a chateau now being used as head- 
quarters we met the battery commander and his 
staff. We had citron presse, which was most re- 
freshing, and clicked our glasses and said, "Vive la 
France." 

The cars were waiting at a point some distance 
from where we had left them. The chauffeurs told 
us that the President of the Republic had just gone 
past in his motor. 

Again we swept on through long avenues of 
trees, then turned off the main road and drove 

76 



IN THE AISNE VALLEY 

through a well-guarded entrance up to the head- 
quarters of the th Army Corps. We met Gen- 
eral d'Esperey, he who held so stoutly his position 
in the center against Von Buelow and Von Kluck 
in the Battle of the Marne — a small man physically 
but with the erect carriage of a martinet, a kindly 
smile, a determined jaw, a leader of men appar- 
ently. 

We encountered a cavalcade of military motors 
in the courtyard and extending in a long file out 
into the road beyond. I wondered what war must 
have looked like before the days of the automobile. 
I wondered what an old-time painter of battle 
scenes would have done without his cavalry charges, 
his dashing orderlies, his forced marches, and his 
picturesque bringing up of the guns to cover a 
retreat. There have been no cavalry actions worthy 
of the name in the western area since Charleroi and 
the engagements that followed the effort of the 
Allies to check the German drive on Paris. The 
dashing orderlies are mounted on motorcycles or 
they ride in racing voiturettes with a fine turn of 
speed. Forced marches are accomplished in motor 
trucks or taxicabs and most of the guns have been 
so long in the same position that the artillerymen 

77 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

have planted little gardens near the doorways of 
their dugouts. 

I am reminded of all this because it was at Corps 
headquarters that we met Hofbauer, the painter. 
We had been told we might see him, he knew only 
that some correspondents were expected. He was 
dumfounded when Johnson and I stepped out of 
the motor — swept back in a moment to the friends 
he had left behind in America. I had known him 
during the early days in Paris and later in New 
York. When war was declared he was at work on 
a big mural decoration at Richmond, Va. When 
the call came for reserves he left it unfinished and 
took the first steamer for Havre. He fought for 
seven months in the open field and in the trenches. 
Then his identity was accidentally discovered; he 

was put on the staff of the th Army Corps and 

given a chance to make a record for history of what 
he had seen. 

His experience has changed him a bit — he is more 
serious and there are sterner lines in his face. 

We wanted to take him with us to Chateau- 
Thierry to dine and spend the night — our head- 
quarters had been moved from Epernay. He hesi- 
tated — it was very difficult to get leave of absence. 

78 




^ 



w 



IN THE AISNE VALLEY 

Johnson spoke to General d'Esperey, and we bun- 
dled Hofbauer into our car and swept out into the 
twilight. 

The road to Chateau-Thierry led us through a 
beautiful undulating country, wind-blown hillsides, 
quaint villages, and forests soaked in showers. It 
was a road of many sudden dips and turns. We 
were asked continually for the password, insistently 
by one corpulent old Territorial who raised his gun 
aloft and rumbled thunder like a veritable Porthos 
of "The Three Musketeers." 

The countersign was always whispered, and I 
never heard it — not during our entire swing in and 
out of the front from the Rheims sector as far north 
as Arras. In this vast network of lines behind 
lines, of main roads and byways, I wondered how 
each night the password was sent to the great army 
of sentries posted throughout the surrounding 
country. I asked our staff captain whether it was 
done by telephone or by an orderly in a motor. He 
evaded the question, and I realized, in the vernacu- 
lar of the day, that I was "butting in" — that this 
was a military secret. 

Chateau-Thierry is the birthplace of La Fon- 
taine. That was its sole claim to fame until last 

81 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

September. Now the townspeople speak of the bat- 
tles in its streets, the fight at the bridge over the 
Marne, and post cards showing the guns captured 
from the "Boches" are displayed in the shop win- 
dows. 

We dined in a private room in the Hotel du 
Cygne. In honor of the occasion a bottle of vintage 
wine, covered with cobwebs, was brought up from 
the cellar. In the wall above my head was a large 
hole made by a six-inch shell, on the opposite side 
another where it had found its way out after wreck- 
ing the chandelier and smashing the mirror. The 
proprietor was very proud of his battle-scarred 
hostelry. An inn in the Marne Valley that shows 
no marks of the fighting after the war is over will 
have to exploit a remarkable cuisine to overcome 
its lack of souvenirs of the struggle. 

We played a post card game after dinner. It 
was a very innocuous game. Each person present 
made a sketch on a post card — Bennett, Mair, John- 
son, Hofbauer, Captain X , Captain Z , 

Corporal F and myself. Then we shuffled up 

the cards, dealt them out and inscribed them to 
absent friends. A devilishly exciting finish to an 
exciting day. 



- 



~ 



< 








' v. .■ - 






Bombardment of St. Jean des Vignes, Soissons 



IN THE AISNE VALLEY 

Later, in our rooms, when we talked of New 
York, Hofbauer was very serious — he wondered 
when he would ever see it again. The officers and 
men we met supplemented everything about their 
plans with the proviso "if I live through the war." 

Captain X asked me on a motor tour in the 

country surrounding his chateau in the Auvergne 
"if he lived through the war." 

Sweaters and raincoats were needed in the morn- 
ing, for a cold wind out of the northwest brought 
with it a dismal rain — a day more like October than 
June. We were up near the front an hour after 
we had left the hotel. With the general and his 
staff we were perched on the observation-platform 
at division headquarters. The general, with the aid 
of a large-scale map, which he held down with diffi- 
culty in the wind, described the fighting in his sec- 
tor. A mist hung over the valley in front of us. 
Little white puffs rolled back from time to time as 
the curtain lifted — shrapnel exploding over the 
French trenches close to the river. 

At our feet were the extensive stables and court- 
yard of an old farmstead, not unlike the fortified 
manoirs of Normandy. The yard was filled with 
cavalrymen grooming their horses. One seldom 

85 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

sees horses so close to the front lines. Directly be- 
low, with a guard watching nonchalantly over them, 
was a group in the peculiar gray-green of the Ger- 
man infantry. They were prisoners from that other 
France across the river Aisne. They seemed to 
accept their new environment philosophically, and 
with the resignation of stoics they went methodi- 
cally about the unmartial task of sweeping out the 
stable-yard. 

Another sprint over a wide, well-kept road and 
we reached a hospital of the first line — a field hos- 
pital. It was established in the outbuildings of a 
large farm. Here were a few badly wounded men, 
too sorely hurt to travel further, and the odor of 
ether, the atmosphere of aseptics and sterilizers, an 
auxiliary field operating room in a tent — adjoining 
the wagon containing the X-ray motor. As we left 
a bearded Territorial mending the roadway called 
out, "Take my photograph too, I was a taxi chauf- 
feur in New York." 

I took his photograph. I wonder when he will 
return to his taxi in New York ! 

Low clouds charged with moisture hung over the 
aviation camp a few kilometers beyond. A street 
of white tents gray in the dull light. By each tent 

86 



IN THE AISNE VALLEY 

stood a motor truck and trailer — on a sudden order 
the tents could be struck, the aeroplanes dissembled 
and all moved to another position in the big vans 
with the celerity of an old-time circus. Thaw and 
Cowdin belonged to this escadrille. Both have 
since been decorated and Cowdin was "cited" — his 
name read before the army in the orders of the day 
— for destroying a Taube. 

Down the hillside from the camp we came upon 
the newest invention of the French — an anti-air- 
craft gun. The officers were very proud of it. It 
was the famous "75" mounted on a motor truck 
(here again an example of the utility of the gaso- 
line motor in warfare), with spring posts under 
each axle to take the recoil. The gun swings on a 
turntable with an elaborate mechanism for sighting 
and firing. We were asked not to photograph or 
describe it. After reading the above, I am con- 
vinced I have done neither. 

The lieutenant who took me in tow complained of 
the German spies. They were all about, he said. 
Two weeks before his men had remarked the flash- 
ing of a heliograph beyond a copse on the ridge. 
When they reached the spot there was no one in 
sight. But from that time forth no Taubes had 

87 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

come within range either. I with difficulty re- 
frained from asking him why, since the enemy knew 
his whereabouts, he had not broken camp and with 
his mobile artillery sought a position elsewhere. 

A thing that impressed itself upon us in this and 
subsequent visits to the front was the class of men 
serving as army chauffeurs. They represented all 
walks of life, and many of them were men of means 
and social position. They were usually privates, 
though every now and then one of them wore the 
chevrons of a corporal. Our own drivers on this 
Aisne Valley tour were very intelligent men, at- 
tentive and respectful and exceedingly solicitous 
about our welfare. Later, when our tournee was 
ending and we were about to take the train back to 
Paris, Johnson, Bennett, Mair, and I discussed the 
advisability of making up a little purse in apprecia- 
tion of their kindness. We fortunately took the 
precaution first to ask our staff-captain about it. 
We hastily withdrew our hands from our pockets 
when we found that in peace times one owned a fac- 
tory employing three hundred and fifty hands, an- 
other was a book publisher in Paris, and a third 
managed a hotel on the Riviera. 

My chauffeur was the book publisher from Paris. 

88 



IN THE AISNE VALLEY 

He and I had a bond of sympathy in our mutual 
interest in the arts. He was most anxious that I 
should see the beautiful Chateau Fere d'Isly. 
Through all the talk of the morning, of guns and 
hospitals, of trenches and aviatiks, of grenades and 
night attacks, he returned at the earliest oppor- 
tunity to the Chateau Fere d'Isly. We were bring- 
ing up the rear of the procession when he suddenly 
swung out of the highway to the left, crept up a 
slope through a dark avenue of trees dripping mois- 
ture, and under a beautiful high-arched aqueduct 
until he slowed up the car at the entrance to the 
chateau. The steps were crumbling and moss-cov- 
ered, the doorway choked with weeds. A few shot 
holes punctured the walls, the windows gaped at the 
intruders, and only a single faithful retainer re- 
mained to tell us that, although the place was now 
well behind the lines, the count and his family had 
not returned since the "Bodies" had been driven out 
of the valley. 

The others were waiting for us at a crossroad. 
I was rather fearful for the book-publishing chauf- 
feur, who had disobeyed orders in leaving the rest 
of the column without permission. Whatever was 
thought about our escapade by the officers, nothing 

89 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

was said — the appreciation of things artistic covers 
a multitude of minor sins in France. 

At the crossroad we left Hofbauer and with him 
two of our staff officers. Their way lay back over 
the hills to the corps headquarters; ours across the 
Marne to Chateau-Thierry, where we were to take 
the train back to Paris. One of the cars was de- 
tached; we shook hands and saluted. We said the 
conventional thing, but through it the subconscious 
thought is really uppermost. No one mentions it, 
but it is there. When? I wonder! They saluted 
again and drove off in the mist. Our cars turned 
in the opposite direction, and we motored south to 
the railway station at Chateau-Thierry. 



90 



CHAPTER V 

SOISSONS A RETROSPECT 

Only once in my motor tours had I driven 
through Soissons. I retained a hazy memory of a 
sleepy little town, of staring white houses, of nar- 
row streets with unsteady chimneys above the tiled 
roofs, a lime-bordered market place, a partly ruined 
abbey and a fine old cathedral. A town at peace 
with the world after a strenuous history, prosperous 
but not aggressively so. The surrounding wheat 
fields were an indication of its busy grain trade. Its 
specialite, my little motor book told me, was white 
beans, and if my memory does not fail me, as a 
proof thereof white beans were part of the menu at 
dejeuner. 

I recollect the road running in from the east and 
out again to the west. The town was never a great 
stopping place for motorists. They came in over 
the route nationale from Rheims and went out 
again over the route nationale toward Compiegne. 
There were no show places except for loitering stu- 

91 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

dents and if Soissons received any attention at all 
it was only to stop, as I had done, for luncheon or to 
fill the reservoir with the needful essence. 

Louis the Debonair was twice imprisoned at Sois- 
sons and Thomas a Becket found shelter in the an- 
cient abbey of St. Jean des Vignes. From the days 
of the Franks and Romans the place was constantly 
besieged. The Germans gave it their attention in 
the Franco-Prussian war. When they entered the 
town after a four days' siege they shot up some of 
the citizens — a monument to their memory stood in 
the Place de la Republic — but the damage they in- 
flicted on its ancient monuments was comparatively 
slight. Civilization has advanced nearly half a 
century since then, this time the Germans have 
spared neither the civil population nor the ancient 
monuments. What was left of the former fortifi- 
cations has long since disappeared. In the present 
war Soissons has been of no military importance ex- 
cept during a short interval following the retreat 
from the Marne, when the right wing of Von 
Kluck's army rested here. 

Yet a more destructive bombardment has been 
directed against its thirteenth century cathedral 
than against the loftier buttresses of Rheims. It 

92 




Effects of shell fire, Soissons Cathedral 



SOISSONS— A RETROSPECT 

has the unfortunate distinction of being a better ex- 
ample of the ruthless destruction by the Germans 
than any other ecclesiastical building in the storm- 
swept Aisne Valley. In this case the Prussian mil- 
itarists cannot fall back on the threadbare excuse of 
military necessity. The towers of the cathedral or 
of the Abbey of St. Jean des Vignes would be use- 
less as an observatory for the simple reason that a 
ridge higher than their highest pinnacles intervenes 
between the northern edge of the town and the Ger- 
man lines. This is a point that Monsieur Dalimier, 
Minister of the Beaux Arts, wished particularly to 
impress upon us when we called upon him in Paris. 

My drawing of St. Jean des Vignes probably 
shows better than any words of mine the effect of 
the German bombardment. It is more or less doc- 
umentary evidence, though it is only a rough sketch 
made when the surrounding atmosphere was 
charged with something more dynamic than the 
dancing sunlight. 

There are times when the effort to register ar- 
tistic impressions near the lines is attended by a 
low dull roar in the distance, followed by a nerve- 
racking explosion close at hand. On these infre- 
quent occasions advantageous positions for "out- 

95 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

door sketching," so called, have to be abandoned, as 
a military expert would say, as untenable. This 
drawback interfered slightly with my work at 
Rheims and rather more seriously at Soissons. 

We approached the town cautiously. The motor 
was given a wide open throttle as we swept across 
the exposed places and slowed down to a soberer 
pace where walls at the roadside afforded protec- 
tion. Early in the morning's run after we had 
crossed the Ourcq and swung into route nationale 
No. 37, the road ran through a smiling land- 
scape with fields of yellowing grain on either side. 
The harvests throughout France in this first year of 
the war are plentiful, the vineyards of Champagne 
will yield a famous cuvee as the vintage of 1915. 
At first we saw women in the fields, working at the 
hay ricks or bundling up the sheaves; there were 
even sleepy black and white cows in the pastures. 
As we went on toward the front the women disap- 
peared, the fields were cut with wide furrows, 
barbed-wire entanglements showed through the 
grain, and the round mounds where lay the dead, 
each marked with its four rough posts, a red cap, 
a cross or a faded wreath, became more frequent. 

As we entered Soissons by the Rue Racine the 

96 



SOISSONS— A RETROSPECT 

place was enveloped in awesome silence. Again, as 
at Rheims during the luncheon hour, the great guns 
on the Craonne plateau and the others on the slopes 
above the Aisne to the south had ceased their in- 
termittent crackle as though a truce had been de- 
clared as the sun touched the meridian. 

Again, as at Rheims, there was a wide swath cut 
in the line of the German fire. Again part of the 
former prosperous business section was laid waste. 
In the Rue du Commerce, the Rue de la Congrega- 
tion, the Rue du College and the district to the 
northeast near the river most of the houses were 
mere shells and fires were smoldering in the ruins. 

We were met, as usual, at the outskirts of the 
town by a staff officer, but there were only a few 
soldiers within the gates. Not enough to do more 
than patrol duty — not enough, surely, to raise the 
place to the dignity of a military depot. The 
French lines are well outside the town to the north 
and east. As for the Soissonnais, the handful of 
them remaining, like the people of Rheims, cling 
to their wrecked houses or cellars. 

To make a ruin out of a ruin seems a waste of 
time. A shell, with only its twin towers and part of 
its thirteenth-century cloisters remaining, St. Jean 

99 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

des Vignes could serve no strategic purpose. The 
reason for the heavy fire directed at it is incompre- 
hensible. In the war of 1870 the facade was dam- 
aged by the heavy German projectiles and the 
points of the arches calcined by the flames. In the 
present series of bombardments there has been a 
more systematic effort to demolish what was left of 
the structure. A part of the stone shaft surmount- 
ing the left tower has been carried off and there are 
ragged gashes in the arched openings. The top of 
the tower on the right has been shot away and the 
hammering of shells and incendiary bombs has left 
its marks across the entire top of the building. The 
little statue at the central apex of the arch is gone, 
the platform supporting the arched portals badly 
cracked, the tiles smashed into powder, the rafters 
burned and a furrow cuts through the stone columns 
and niches of the facade where a shell has swept by. 
The wreck of the cathedral is more appalling. A 
solid old pile, it dates from the twelfth century and 
was an excellent example of combined Gothic and 
Romanesque design. It has withstood many sieges, 
but its massive construction was no proof against 
the assaults of modern guns. Eighty shells were 
thrown into the building by high angle fire in the 

100 



SOISSONS— A RETROSPECT 

first few days after the enemy was established on 
the plateau to the north. The bombardment has 
been continued almost without cessation ever since. 

My sketches were made early in July of 1915. 
Clouds of powdered dust then rose from the ruins 
and columns of smoke from the burning houses of 
the neighborhood. As I write this in the late au- 
tumn the communique of the day reports that "the 
enemy has fired a number of incendiary shells on 
Soissons and the region round about." 

By this time the cathedral is probably completely 
demolished. In July the interior was a mass of 
crumpled masonry, choir stalls and pries-dieu were 
covered with debris. The fine stained glass of the 
Gothic windows was smashed and the tombs crushed 
in. The choir or north transept showed the great- 
est injury and there was an enormous hole in the 
roof of the apse through which a flood of sunlight 
streamed across a fallen column. Though every 
stone of it was separate the column still preserved 
its outline with the carved capital intact like a fallen 
giant. 

The north facade was plentifully spotted with 
shot holes, the broken rafters show above the but- 
tresses, the bays of the arches and the shattered 

101 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

pinnacles sticking up like jagged teeth. In the 
north side there was another enormous hole where 
the wall was blown out — evidently by a large caliber 
shell — a "marmite." 

The French resent particularly the devastation of 
Soissons. In the volume "Les Allemands destruc- 
teurs," which is published by the "Fraternite des 
Artistes," Anatole France says that "the brutal and 
stupid destruction of monuments consecrated by 
art and the years is a crime that war does not ex- 
cuse." He quotes from a page in "Autour de 
Paris" which touched him to the point of tears. It 
is a beautiful word picture of the town that was. I 
quote it here: 

"Soissons is a city, white, peaceful, smiling, with 
its tower and its pointed steeples rising from the 
banks of a lazy river in the middle of a circle of 
green hills; city and landscape make one dream of 
the little picture painted with such loving care by 
the illuminating artists of our old manuscripts. 
Precious monuments tell all the history of the 
French monarchy, from the Merovingian crypts 
of the Abbey of St. Medard to the fine edifice 
erected just before the Revolution for the use of 
the lord-lieutenants of the province. From the 

102 




o 



c 




~ 



SOISSONS— A RETROSPECT 

cluster of narrow streets and little gardens, a mag- 
nificent cathedral extends skyward the two arms of 
its great transept; to the north there is a straight 
wall and a vast window; to the south there is the 
marvelous apse where the pointed arch and the 
semicircle delicately mingle." 



105 



CHAPTER VI 

A LITTLE JOURNEY TO COMPIEGNE 

I went to Compiegne alone. At least I thought 
I went to Compiegne alone. On the platform of 
the Gare du Nord there was a party of French war 
correspondents. But they were in charge of a staff 
officer. I was independent of them. I carried in 
my pocket my little yellow laisser passer and for 
the first time was making a tournee by myself. 
Owen Johnson stayed in Paris to interview Del- 
casse and Arnold Bennett had an engagement — I 
was going up to the front, as I thought, under my 
own personal direction. 

I have never seen so long a train. The locomo- 
tives were far ahead in the yards. The trains on 
any of the lines toward the north or east are so 
infrequent that all are packed. This was the ex- 
press for Amiens and Boulogne — I had to change 
at Creil. 

Creil, Senlis and Meaux are the nearest points 
to Paris reached by the Germans on the drive that 

106 



A LITTLE JOURNEY TO COMPIEGNE 

was checked at the Battle of the Marne. If you 
believe any of the many stories that are told you 
in Paris, however, the lances and helmets of the 
Uhlan patrols were seen only ten kilometers out- 
side the fortifications. 

It was at Creil that I received my first check as 
an unattended correspondent. A gendarme told 
me to go to the little ticket window and have my 
credentials vises before I could proceed to Com- 
piegne. I went down under a tunnel and up again. 
Stretching out of the waiting room from the little 
window was a queue like the ones waiting to buy 
tickets for a World Series. Some of the people 
were sitting patiently on market baskets or valises 
— the line was so long that only a part of it was 
within the station — the others stood under the broil- 
ing sun outside. 

Surely a correspondent with an authorisation for 

the th Army Corps would not have to wait his 

turn with all these common people! I thought to 
circumvent the authorities by doubling back and 
coming up another stairway. But my friend the 
gendarme was on the job. This time he led me 
back to an officer. He explained that I carried a 
laisser passer signed by the Minister of the Bureau 

107 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

des Affaires Etrangeres in "Paris. The officer could 
not see wherein that entitled me to any special 
privileges and back to the tail end of the line I 
went. 

It was market day in Creil and most of the peo- 
ple came from smaller stations along the way to 
Compiegne. They were very smelly people. In 
front of me was a woman with a squalling baby. 
I was surprised to find at my back a peasant 
dressed in the costume of the Basque countries. A 
husky butcher edged his way ahead brushing the 
woman aside. My friend the Gascon protested. 
It was malheureuse, he said. He appealed to the 
officer who kept the line formed. The officer 
yanked the offender out and placed him at the rear 
of the procession. We found a box and made the 
woman sit on it. The heat was fearful and we 
progressed toward the window by inches. The peo- 
ple accepted the situation with unconcern. It was 
the war, they said, and these inconveniences were all 
"a la guerre comme a la guerre." It was almost 
train time and I asked the officer if it would wait 
for us. It would wait, he said, until tout le monde 
had their passes countersigned. The train waited 
and we left Creil almost an hour late. In the next 

108 



A LITTLE JOURNEY TO COMPIEGNE 

compartment to me I noticed an officer with the 
red and white badge of the staff on his arm. 

It was a peaceful landscape through which we 
passed. The little jerk- water train stopped at 
every station and on the platforms the farmers' 
wives and daughters were waiting. There were 
continual evidences of the fighting last September. 
There was a large sign with "Heinz's 57 Varieties" 
shot full of holes, there were stumps of trees stick- 
ing above the shrubbery, and old houses sporting 
new roofs of bright red tile. Stopped at the sta- 
tions, we could hear the sound of hammering where 
other roofs were being constructed. A sign of con- 
fidence, this effort on the part of the farmers to 
rebuild their homes, of faith in the army that had 
swept the Germans back and would never let them 
pass that way again. Here and there was a house 
too far gone to be worth rebuilding or a white 
church tower with the holes in its belfry freshly 
plastered up. At Longueuil Ste. Marie a wrecked 
German motor truck covered with rust was lying 
in the ditch at the roadside close to the station, its 
rear wheels shot away, the steering gear and motor 
blown out but the front wheels and radiator un- 
damaged. 

109 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

Compiegne is eight miles back of the German 
lines. It is shelled occasionally to keep the people 
properly in awe of the marksmanship of the Ger- 
man gunners. But the range is too great, most of 
the shells have fallen in the famous forest and so far 
little damage has been done to the town itself. 
Compiegne got off lightly at the hands of the Ger- 
mans. They came through triumphant and full of 
confidence; they made the town the temporary 
headquarters of an army corps; they were to be in 
Paris three days later. They paid for what they 
took and left a good impression. They never 
came back. The Allies dynamited the Pont Neuf, 
the large bridge across the Oise, and when the tide 
turned at the Marne the Germans were forced to 
cross the Aisne, which flows into the Oise just out- 
side of Compiegne, further to the east. 

I left Paris at eight o'clock in the morning. It 
took me until eleven-thirty to cover the fifty miles 
to Compiegne, an example of how the train service 
is disrupted in war times. 

I was only a short time realizing that my unat- 
tended tour would be confined to the limits of Com- 
piegne. I told my cabman to drive north from the 
railway station, that I wanted him to take me as 

110 



A LITTLE JOURNEY TO COMPIEGNE 

far as possible toward the trenches. He seemed 
dumbfounded. He called an officer. The officer 
carefully examined my papers and told me that my 
authorisation was for Compiegne only. I told him 
that I had already been through the lines at Rheims, 
Bethany and along the Aisne Valley near Soissons. 
He impressed upon me politely that whatever priv- 
ileges had been extended to me by the th Army 

Corps, the th Army Corps would hold me to 

the letter of my laissir passer. Another officer ap- 
peared. He added that I must under no circum- 
stances attempt to leave the place except by the 
train back to Paris. The train left each afternoon 
at three-thirty and my visit to Compiegne was 
limited to two days. 

Army motors were waiting for the French corre- 
spondents. As they drove off I felt deserted. My 
little tour to the front was not going to be the 
success I had anticipated. I told my driver to 
follow them over the pontoon bridge to the town 
across the river — the bridge that temporarily re- 
places the one that has been destroyed. 

I went first to the ruins of the Pont Neuf to see 
what the light was like for a drawing. I found I 
would have to wait until the afternoon. In the 

111 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

meantime I took a number of photographs along 
the river bank and in the streets that lead away 
from it. As I returned to the bridge a gendarme 
stopped me and demanded my papers. I showed 
him my authorisation from Paris and my passport. 
He seemed to be suspicious of me. He was joined 
by another gendarme. Didn't I know, they asked, 
that taking photographs in Compiegne was de- 
fendu by order of the General commanding? It 
occurred to me that a little knowledge was a dan- 
gerous thing. I pretended not to understand them 
and, as though it was a phrase I had been taught 
to say in case I got into trouble, I repeated like a 
parrot "telephone a Monsieur Ponsot a Paris!" 
They insisted that my laissir passer gave me no 
permission to take photographs. They asked me 
if I didn't know that I was liable to arrest and 
imprisonment for breaking a military regulation. 
"Telephone a Monsieur Ponsot a Paris/' "He 
is too big a fool to be a spy," said one to the other. 
"We are forced to arrest you and take you to head- 
quarters," they said to me. "Telephone a Monsieur 
Ponsot a Paris" I repeated. Suddenly the officer 
I had noticed in the train from Creil appeared. He 
said something and they released me. I thanked 

112 



A LITTLE JOURNEY TO COMPIEGNE 

him, saluted my erstwhile captors and returned to 
the hotel for luncheon. 

The Palace Hotel, where I had stopped on two 
of my motor tours was sadly changed — the great 
chateau of Louis XV deserted. Gone was the 
army of sightseers — the "Cookies" up from Paris 
being escorted about in their open carriages. Gone 
were the fashionable motors in the inn court-yard, 
in their places businesslike looking cars in the bat- 
tleship gray of the army. Gone were the waiters, 
we were served only by a venerable old man and 
some boys. Under the ruined arches of the bridge 
close to the river bank I went to work shortly after 
luncheon. I wondered if making a drawing was 
also defendu. It probably was, but for a long time 
I kept at my task unnoticed. The attention of the 
populace was attracted by a diver who was de- 
scending into the river to locate the caissons for the 
central span of the new bridge. The shaky tem- 
porary structure nearby was crowded with people. 
They seemed intent upon the doings at the bottom 
of the river. Behind them from time to time an 
ambulance rumbled across the bridge bringing 
wounded back from the lines. One of the most im- 
portant of the base hospitals is located here, under 

113 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

the direction of Dr. Carrel of New York. The 
ambulances were carrying the harvest from an ar- 
tillery action on the front to the north. The sullen 
rumble of guns in action came down occasionally 
on the wind. The wounded, sometimes with bloody 
bandages showing through the flapping side cur- 
tains of the automobiles, passed behind the people 
— unnoticed. 

What a commentary upon the dull acceptance of 
war time conditions, I thought, that these ambu- 
lances from the battle line should carry their 
wounded freight across the bridge unnoticed by the 
crowd that watched a diver descending into the river 
bed! 

It was not until the diver and his assistants had 
knocked off work that the attention of the towns- 
people on the bridge was focused upon me. Some 
of them descended onto the piers and watched me. 
The sketch was tres beau, they said. They beckoned 
others — among them a British "Tommy." He had 
brought in two wounded men from the trenches 
in the morning and was going back to the field 
hospital with his little auto full of surgical supplies. 
He was very proud of his car — a Ford. I told him 
we called them "flivvers." He didn't care, he said, 

114 



A LITTLE JOURNEY TO COMPIEGNE 

" 'is bloomin' gig could go anywhere, it could 'op 
out of anythink in the battle line except the 
trenches." When I thought of the service to hu- 
manity this little car was rendering, I could almost 
forgive the Detroit manufacturer who, according 
to report, advocates a defenseless country and 
boasts that only a dozen of his ten thousand em- 
ployees belong to the State militia. 

A battery of artillery shook the bridge. Behind 
it followed Red-Cross motor trucks and some offi- 
cers on horses. One is so accustomed to seeing offi- 
cers dashing up in racing motors that to find them 
mounted takes one by surprise. Then a regiment 
of Senegalese crossed at a rapid walk and from the 
opposite direction came more Red- Cross ambu- 
lances. Evidently the action on the front to the 
north was increasing in intensity. I continued to 
hold the center of the stage. My audience had be- 
come accustomed to military activity but not to a 
correspondent sketching a ruined bridge. 

Attracted by the crowd, two more gendarmes ap- 
peared. Again I showed my papers. They were 
sure photographing was forbidden, but this was a 
sketch, and they could not fathom my object in 
wanting to sketch a ruined bridge. "For what pur- 

115 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

pose does Monsieur make the drawing of the 
bridge," they asked. "Telephone a Monsieur Ton- 
sot a Paris." 

My belated visit to the General loomed imminent 
on the horizon when again my friend of the train 
appeared. He brushed away the crowd and with it 
the gendarmes. I finished my work alone. 

Back at the square in the center of the town 
again I stopped at a cafe for an aperitif. When 
the waiter found I was going back to Paris that 
night he asked if I would not take his letters and 
mail them in the city. It was four or five days, in 
the usual run of events, he said, before they would 
leave Compiegne. Upon the appearance of my 
officer of the train at an adjoining table, he changed 
the subject. When I referred to it later, he placed 
a warning finger on his lips. He had thought bet- 
ter of it, he whispered, and preferred to run no risk 
of getting in trouble with the authorities. Prob- 
ably letters to his sweetheart, but you would have 
thought he was hatching a plot against the Gov- 
ernment. 

On the train headed back to Paris with this 
officer in a nearby compartment, for the first time 
it began to dawn upon me that I had been under 

116 




Protecting with sandbags the Porte de la Vierge Doree, 
Amiens Cathedral 



A LITTLE JOURNEY TO COMPIEGNE 

surveillance. It was only coincidence, possibly, 
although I see no reason why a correspondent with 
a camera and sketching materials should be allowed 
to run at large so near the front lines as Compiegne. 
No one can take issue with the French War De- 
partment for doing everything in its power to 
prevent espionage. It is their own war and they 
seem to know how to conduct it. 

I am sure that after Johnson and I applied for 
permission to go to the front in Paris our connec- 
tions in New York were carefully looked up. Had 
we counted many German-Americans among our 
acquaintances or been habitues of the German res- 
taurants we would have remained in Paris and our 
movements watched until we were on our way to 
Bordeaux to catch the steamer home. 

It was a dark, humid night and the streets out- 
side the Gare du Nord were crowded when I came 
out of the station following my arrival in Paris. 
The crowd was composed almost entirely of women 
waiting for the soldiers due home on the four days' 
"permission" or leave of absence. A surging, ex- 
pectant crowd was waiting for the short visit al- 
lowed to each man at the front. The women have 
no information about the arrival of the trains, they 

119 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

simply wait on through the long days with patience 
until they see a familiar face in the crowd coming 
from the arrival platform. The women of France 
are used to waiting. 

The few taxi-cabs had all been seized. I took 
the underground and got off at the Opera for a 
belated dinner at the Cafe de la Paix. It was ten 
o'clock and they were just about to close up. But 
they gave me an hors d'oeuvre, some cold chicken, 
salad and a bottle of wine. Imagine the Cafe de la 
Paix, the tourists' center of the world, closing at 
10.30 p. M.! 

It was a hot night and the few taxis usually 
found in the boulevards were all engaged. I dis- 
covered a horse cab in waiting and commandeered 
it. As we passed "Maxim's" the horse without 
warning three times lifted his heels and kicked into 
the dash of the voiture. The cabby lashed him with 
the whip and cursed him in English. When I 
asked him where he had learned to curse so roundly 
in English, he said that for four years he had driven 
a hack in Brooklyn. With the battered woodwork 
of the cab clattering on the pavement below, we 
drove through the black, empty spaces on the 
Champs Elysees up to the door of my hotel. 

120 



CHAPTER VII 

THE BELEAGUERED CITY OF ARRAS 

The trip to the Rheims sector was like a pleas- 
ant tour with a spice of warlike atmosphere com- 
pared to the sterner realities of the visit to the 
famous Artois sector and the region about Arras. 
We left Paris, as usual, by train, and, as usual, 
with an escort of officers with the red-and-white 
badge of the staff on their arms. There were few 
women, few civilians on the train. It was all gold 
lace and uniforms — officers bound to their different 
assignments along the great battle line that runs 
almost due north from Compiegne. The proximity 
of this battle line was continually in evidence. We 
passed flat cars loaded with guns, caissons, barbed 
wire and munitions or box cars filled with com- 
missary supplies. At Creil a long hospital train 
had just pulled into the station. Men and women 
of the place passed along the platforms carrying 
large baskets of ripe cherries which they lifted 
above their heads that the wounded soldiers might 
more easily reach them. 

121 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

At Amiens we abandoned the train to move up 
to the front by motor. We had luncheon in the 
station. There were many English officers and 
their wives in the restaurant. Amiens is the nearest 
big town to the right flank of the British line. The 
Germans occupied it for a few days as their en- 
compassing advance swept out almost to the coast 
on the march to Paris. Here and there a weather- 
beaten proclamation in German stared at us from 
a dead wall — a souvenir of the Uhlan visit — and in 
the shop windows were post cards showing compa- 
nies of infantry in long gray coats and spiked hel- 
mets encamped in the Place St. Roch. Then came 
the Marne and the stay of the invaders was cut 
short, for after the Marne a retreat followed as 
rapid as had been their advance. 

I had been before in Amiens — now I scarcely 
knew it. The ancient capital of Picardy had im- 
pressed itself upon me as being a very busy manu- 
facturing town, of many twisting streets lined with 
old houses of half timber and moss-covered tiled 
roofs tilted at a rakish angle, of open boulevards 
and an excellent hotel with an attractive courtyard 
and garden. I recollect walking in the moonlight 
up to the three great portals of the cathedral, with 

122 



THE BELEAGUERED CITY OF ARRAS 

their deep and mysterious shadows, and the lofty 
pinnacles of the towers cutting against the blue 
above, and refusing to go back in the morning for 
fear that my first sensation might be effaced. And 
I carried in my mind the picture of these same twin 
towers, from a distance, rising above the neighbor- 
ing chimney pots and gabled roofs, as I motored 
to the north the next day. 

The town seemed completely transformed. Or 
was it that my first impression, a fleeting one, had 
become more filmy as time passed? More likely 
that this first impression was swept away before 
the bustle and activity attendant upon the move- 
ment of men and supplies, the comings and goings 
of military motors, trucks and ambulances, of 
khaki-clad British officers with flat caps and swag- 
ger sticks, of bearded poilus in long coats and 
baggy breeches that filled the streets with exotic 
life and color. Be that as it may, the Amiens I had 
known seemed strangely unfamiliar. 

We passed the Cathedral. Long ladders were 
laid against the three lofty porches of the facade 
and workmen were piling against them an embank- 
ment of sand bags to protect the reliefs and stat- 
ues. On the south side, the beautiful sculpture 

125 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

that decorates the Porte de la Vierge Doree was 
already covered up to the apex of the arch and a 
white-shirted laborer, tottering on his lofty perch, 
was putting the final bags in place. 

Remembering Rheims and Soissons and the 
countless small churches in the Aisne valley and the 
Argonne, Amiens Cathedral is being safeguarded 
by the authorities as far as possible against the at- 
tack of hostile airmen or the destructive fire of the 
German guns. 

A much traveled road, the one to Doullens, its 
surface rough from the heavy traffic. Here we 
were in a busier sector than any other we had seen. 

At Doullens, Captain Y of the staff of the 

th Army Corps joined us. Beyond the little 

village we followed for a time route nationale No. 
25. I had motored over this same road once before 
as I drove northeast from Abbeville following the 
motor Grand Prix of 1908. We kept to it for 
only a short distance because, for practically all 
of the thirty-five kilometers from Doullens to Ar- 
ras, it comes within range of the German guns. A 
short dash, and we turned off to the left to edge our 
way forward through protected country byways. 

126 










- . . 



- 




Arras-" At the end of a cul-de-sac. the shells tearing through the narrow 
street had blown out the walls of a house from beneath its roof" 



THE BELEAGUERED CITY OF ARRAS 

We passed through Lucheux, a little hamlet with a 
picturesque stone arched gate standing in the road- 
way. 

I had no sooner remarked upon the peasants 
working in the fields and the farmers' carts in the 
inn courtyards before both disappeared. In their 
places were the tents of the farriers' camps, Red- 
Cross trucks, commissary wagons, military motors, 
artillery batteries in reserve, repair shops, horses, 
men and munitions — all the numerous cogs that fit 
into the vast organization behind the actual fighting 
line of the army. 

Other small villages — Barly, Wauquetin passed. 
We drove into little valleys and out again or crept 
along embankments where the road had been cut 
deeper to afford protection. The distant roar of 
the German guns and the answering crackle of the 
French "75's," muffled at first like the warning 
thunder of an approaching storm, grew louder as 
we pushed forward. 

Our motors advanced in a series of charges, dash- 
ing past an open space at cup-race speed, slowing 
down in a ravine or where the walls at the roadside 
sheltered us, then shooting ahead again. I was be- 
coming accustomed to these short spurts, but I 

129 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

never ceased to wonder why we were not as likely 
to run into a shell as to be caught on the wing by 
one. 

A blight had fallen upon the landscape, and the 
sun had disappeared, when, beyond Dainville, we 
crept gingerly back to the route nationale. At the 
end of the long white road ahead a fierce bombard- 
ment was in progress. Straightened out on the 
highway, we waited for a signal, and then rushed 
through the zone raked by the enemy's fire up to 
the town gates of Arras. 

A sentry stepped out of the box at the octroi and 
demanded the password. The sign-posts of the 
Touring Club of France, "Doullens 25 kilometers," 
"Amiens 60 kilometers," still marked the distances 
along the road, but the blue of the signs was faded, 
and the lettering indistinct. The tire and chocolate 
advertisements on the sign-boards lining the roads 
still remained, scarred with shrapnel and full of 
shot-holes. 

Before considering the evil days upon which Ar- 
ras has fallen it might be well to recall something 
of its history and its strategical position in the war. 
It lies in the center of the much-f ought-over battle 
grounds of the ancient province of Pays d'Artois, 

130 



THE BELEAGUERED CITY OF ARRAS 

of which it was the old time capital. It changed 
hands many times during the feudal wars of the 
Middle Ages. After the battle of Agincourt the 
treaty of peace between the French and English 
was signed at Arras in 1415. In 1482 the Peace of 
Arras marked the line of the northern frontier of 
France. 

In the spring of 1709, after Marlborough's win- 
ter in northern France, Arras was looked upon as 
the gate to Paris and with La Bassee, another im- 
portant position in the present war, was strongly 
fortified by the French General Villars. In the 
spring of 1710, after the Great Duke had cap- 
tured Douai, he marched westward for a second 
drive against Arras. The town was impregnably 
fortified by new trenches and for a second time the 
route to Paris was blocked. Like its unfortunate 
neighbor to the north — Ypres — it has known bom- 
bardment and devastation and its cobbled streets 
have many times echoed the clank of mailed feet. 
When the great war broke out it was a prosperous 
town of about 25,000 inhabitants and a busy com- 
mercial center, with a network of railways running 
northwest to the coast at Boulogne and Calais, to 
Lens and Ypres on the north and down the valley 

131 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

of the Ancre to Amiens and Paris. Its ancient 
ramparts were the work of Vauban and it was not- 
able as the birthplace of Robespierre. 

The town lies on the northern edge of the plateau 
which rises above the Somme Valley and extends 
northward to the flats and dykes about the Scheldt. 
The lofty belfry of its Hotel de Ville, a beautiful 
building rising above the arcaded Petite Place, 
looked out over a peaceful landscape of grain fields 
and pastures. The gentle hills to the west inter- 
vened between the valley and the sea and the long 
white lines of the routes nationales stretched out 
like the spokes of a wheel through the Picardy 
countryside. Lombardy poplars in long rows like 
sentinels protected the roads, with now and then the 
glint of a stream or a church spire above a mass of 
woodland. To the north beyond Lens, the Black 
Country of France begins. The collieries and 
smoky chimneys remind one of the coal regions of 
Pennsylvania. Between this distant land of clouds 
and yellow smoke and the Scarpe at one's feet is 
the valley that has become in the present war the 
greatest battle ground in history. It is known 
technically as the Artois sector. 

Within the bowl-shaped hills that envelop it lie 

132 



THE BELEAGUERED CITY OF ARRAS 

Mont St. Eloi, La Targette, Neuville St. Vaast, 
the Labyrinthe, Clarency, Souchez, Ablain St. Na- 
zaire and Notre Dame de Lorette. All these names 
have become famous in the fighting around Ar- 
ras. 

At the beginning of the Great War, as in Marl- 
borough's campaign, the city played an important 
part in the military strategy of both sides. After 
the Germans broke out of Belgium the quick 
marching Uhlan cavalry, after threatening Bou- 
logne and Montreuil to the west, entered Arras in 
September. The advance patrol of Maud'huy's 
th Army Corps drove them out shortly after- 
ward and forced them back toward Douai. For 
many days thereafter a stubborn battle raged to the 
east of Arras. The Germans were reinforced by the 
Prussian guard under Von Buelow, fresh from the 
Battle of the Marne. With this help they rolled 
up the French attack, bent Maud'huy's Corps 
back toward the west, and commenced the ceaseless 
bombardment that meant the beginning of the end 
for the historic monuments of Arras. 

The French were reinforced and held the enemy 
in check. And while the Germans were able to oc- 
cupy their former position and entrench themselves 

133 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

in the suburbs, up to this writing they have found 
it impossible to obtain a foothold in the town itself. 

After the long* Allied line that begins at Ypres 
and stretches south until it turns eastward above 
Compiegne was straightened out the heaviest fight- 
ing centered about Arras and the surrounding 
country. The Germans have again and again at- 
tempted to drive a wedge through the Artois sector. 
They have been hammering away with a definite 
object in view, namely to turn the left wing of 

Maud'huy's th Corps and cut off the British 

army to the north, leaving it with overwhelming 
German forces in front and only the Channel ports 
behind it. 

The drive has not succeeded. But what of Arras 
in the meantime ? It would take the imagination of 
Dore to visualize the ruins of the former capital of 
Artois. 

Our advent in Rheims had been accomplished 
without accident. So, too, our appearance in Ar- 
ras. But this last was a far different matter. Here 
a continuous bombardment of the city was in prog- 
ress. It was a gray day, and the low-hanging 
clouds seemed to hold the fumes and gases of ex- 
ploding shells closer to the ground. The firing 

134. 



THE BELEAGUERED CITY OF ARRAS 

came apparently from every point of the compass, 
sometimes in desultory discharges and again in 
salvos followed by an interval of quiet. The mo- 
tors did not, as at Rheims, dash through the streets 
to the center of the town. On the contrary, we 
nosed our way in carefully, taking advantage of 
protecting walls and partly ruined houses, turning 
out to avoid shell holes in the pavement, broken 
telegraph wires dangling overhead, or the debris 
of toppled walls and chimneys that littered the 
streets. We were playing hide and seek with an 
invisible enemy of whose mighty power the evi- 
dence was all about us — in the devastated homes, 
the blackened rooftrees and chimneys, and the 
smoking ruins of town hall and cathedral. 

The cobbles were strewn with rusty pieces of 
broken shell, grass grew in the interstices and in 
the cracks between the paving stones. There was 
no sign of life — unless you call the clatter of shells 
overhead a sign of life — until, after leaving the cars 
in a protected spot, we went to headquarters to 
pay our respects to the General in command. He 
was a cheerful stout man — so like General Joffre 
in appearance that my photograph of him might 
easily pass for one of the Generalissimo himself. 

135 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

He complained of the spies. His headquarters 
had been moved two days before and already the 
Germans knew the whereabouts of the staff. In 
proof of this he showed us a large cavity in the 
garden at the rear where a "marmite" had exploded 
that morning. He also showed us a shell hole in 
the wall of the house — the shell had swept down 
the cut glass chandelier, loosened the plaster of the 
walls and demolished a mahogany sideboard and 
a beautiful mahogany table and chairs. Still un- 
damaged the old rose window-curtains moved 
gently in the breeze that came in through the open- 
ing. 

The General took us to his sleeping apartment in 
the cellar. A. very cool and pleasant place, he said, 
but he had to bolster up with sand bags the grating 
upon which he depended for light and air because of 
the flying shrapnel in the street outside. 

In a drizzle of rain we crossed a desolate little 
square. Arras was like a city of the dead; it gave 
one something of the sensation of walking through 
the ghostly cairns of Pompeii or St. Pierre Mar- 
tinique. It was like a giant catacomb and the low- 
ering clouds of yellow smoke hanging like a pall 
overhead, the deserted streets, the empty shells of 

186 




An inn courtyard after bombardment, Arras 



THE BELEAGUERED CITY OF ARRAS 

nouses, the growl of artillery, and the occasional 
violent detonation when an explosive bomb landed 
increased the uncanny feeling of death and dis- 
aster. In spite of the intermittent crackle of gun 
fire we unconsciously lowered our voices. A lean- 
ing chimney, all that remained of the one-time resi- 
dence of some prosperous merchant, toppled over 
as we looked at it. A cloud of dust rose as it 
crashed into the ruins below. Through the wet 
blanket of rain, the outlines of broken walls and 
blackened rooftrees were hazy and indistinct. 

At the end of a cul de sac, the shells tearing 
through the narrow street had blown out the walls 
of a house from beneath its roof. Beyond the gaunt 
opening tottering chimneys and blackened rafters 
showed through the yellow haze in the distance. 
Underneath in the smoking ruins, window blinds, 
doors, stairways, old bedposts and bits of furniture 
were shuffled up with bricks and stones in artistic 
confusion. Above, the red tiled roof, undamaged 
and with the little white curtain still hanging in 
the dormer window, hung suspended like a bridge 
from the walls on either side. I wondered what a 
motor car would look like after it had been hit by 
a shell. A little later I found out. 

139 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

There was a sudden lull in the cannonading as 
though both sides, breathless, had stopped at a 
given signal. We could hear the echo of our foot- 
steps on the cobbles. We came out into the district 
of shops. An epicerie displayed tins of American 
canned goods in its broken windows ; there was not 
a whole pane of glass in the city. The grocer con- 
ducted his business in the cellar. In a narrow street 
a few vegetables and some fruit were on sale with 
little price marks sticking in the trays. Women 
and small girls were standing at the side of the 
market carts. It was a pitifully meager market, 
but the women were undismayed. A little further 
on we came across a car that had been hit by a 
shell. It was a low, gray racing runabout of the 
torpedo type. It had evidently been used by a 
despatch bearer or as an official car for the staff. 
The frame of the chassis was broken in the middle, 
the radiator and bonnet gone, and three of the four 
cylinders poked themselves above the open crank 
case. There was only one fender left and a part 
of the tonneau in the rear — the rest of the machine 
had been blown to bits against the neighboring 
wall. 

A turn out of the little Rue de Jerusalem brought 

140 



THE BELEAGUERED CITY OF ARRAS 

us up to the cathedral. It had been violently bom- 
barded since early morning. There was an enor- 
mous new "marmite" hole in the northern facade, 
some of the cornices had been shot away and many 
of the columns were smashed into a shapeless mass 
of stone. A cloud of tawny smoke rose from the 
interior; beneath it was the crimson glow of many 
small fires started by incendiary bombs. Soldiers 
had laid lines of hose and were playing streams 
upon the ruins. They might as well have tried to 
put out Vesuvius. As fast as a blaze would 
be smothered in one part of the building a 
bomb dropped and started another somewhere 
else. 

A tired-looking group of townspeople — there are 
a thousand of its twenty-five thousand inhabitants 
still remaining — whispered together as they 
watched the destruction of the cathedral. A priest 
stood in the rain with bared head. 

The devastation was complete in whatever direc- 
tion we turned. The girders of the enormous steel 
train shed at the railway station were broken in 
and every skylight smashed. The arrival and de- 
parture platforms were covered with debris and 
grass three feet high grew over the tracks of one 

141 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

of the greatest railway centers of northern France. 
In the Rue Gambetta nearby the beautiful Ursuline 
chapel was badly damaged. Pieces of its tower had 
been shot away and in its irregular outlines it some- 
what resembled an unsteady spiral staircase of 
stone. 

Following the Rue Douai in the environs to- 
ward Blangy there is nothing left of the town 
at all. There was not a house standing intact and 
only a few of the chimneys. Trees, freshly hewn 
off as if by an ax, were flung across the streets — 
everywhere great holes in the cobble stones where 
the shells had torn up the pavement. One house was 
gutted, but its green tiled fireplaces, one on top of 
the other, were as carefully polished as though their 
owners had just left them. Further out was a little 
cottage that brought us to a stop with a catch in 
our throats. Its walls were blown out and in the 
rear the ceiling of the second floor had fallen over 
the kitchen range. The front bedroom remained, 
with its outside wall swiped off; in it were a little 
white bed, a table with a reading lamp, a pair of 
slippers, a wardrobe hung with women's clothes, 
with some hat boxes above. The door jamb under- 
neath was supported by the only part of the front 

142 



THE BELEAGUERED CITY OF ARRAS 

wall still standing. Set in bricks at the side was a 
neat brass plate with the sign "Madame Houdain, 
Modes." The story of Madame Houdain would 
seem to need no further telling. 

We were leisurely crossing the square by the rail- 
way station when a picket rode out on a bicycle. 
The open place was directly in the line of the Ger- 
man gun fire, he said, and he begged us to hurry. 
We hurried. The fire arrived with us as we entered 
the Grande Place. We winced at two loud detona- 
tions in the low clouds above and the soldiers in the 
shelter of the arcade thought it very amusing. It 
would have been funnier to me had I been under 
the arches with them. 

These arches run completely around the Grande 
Place — a relic of the Spanish occupation. The 
troops were bivouacked under them, their guns 
stacked and the smoke of their mess-stoves rolling 
out into the mist. They were playing cards or loll- 
ing about leisurely until dusk when the time came 
to relieve their comrades in the trenches just outside 
the city walls. 

Victor Hugo says of Arras: "There are two 
curious squares with scrolled gables in the Flemish- 
Spanish style of the time of Louis XIII. In one 

148 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

of the squares, the smaller, there is a charming town 
hall of the fifteenth century adjoining a delightful 
house of the Renaissance." 

I well remember the Hotel de Ville. Its splendid 
belfry towered above the city and was the first 
landmark to be sighted as one approached by mo- 
tor. It was supposed to be the finest Gothic edi- 
fice in northern France. At the top of the tower 
was a crown, below were three bronze clocks, and 
in the belfry was an enormous bell the people called 
"La Joyeuse." This was a shining mark for the 
German guns. After the invaders had been driven 
out beyond the walls of the town in October, and 
placed their batteries on the hills to the east, they 
commenced an endless bombardment of Arras with 
the belfry of the Hotel de Ville as the bull's-eye 
on the target. 

The first shell fired at the town hit the tower and 
little by little it was shot away until it was only 
slightly higher than the nearby house tops. Mili- 
tary necessity might again be offered here as an 
excuse, for the top of the tower undoubtedly af- 
forded an unobstructed view of the surrounding 
countryside; but one must look for a better reason 
in a war where scouting aeroplanes and captive bal- 

144 



THE BELEAGUERED CITY OF ARRAS 

loons have superseded more stable methods of mak- 
ing observations. 

An excuse as logical as any other can be found 
in the amazing statement of a German officer. Fol- 
lowing the shocked protests of the neutral countries 
after the German devastation during the early days 
of the Great War, Major General von Ditfurth 
thus expressed himself in the "Hamburger Nach- 
richten" of November, 1914: 

It is of no consequence if all the monuments ever created, 
all the pictures ever painted, and all the buildings ever erected 
by the great architects of the world were destroyed, if by their 
destruction we promote German victory over her enemies. The 
commonest, ugliest stone placed to mark the burial place of a 
German grenadier is a more glorious and perfect monument 
than all the cathedrals in Europe put together. Let neutral 
people cease their talk about the cathedrals of Rheims and all 
the churches and castles in France that have shared its fate. 
These things do not interest us. 

I had been in a way prepared for it, yet the com- 
plete destruction of the Hotel de Ville was a more 
distressing picture than any I had imagined in 
my sordid dreams. The irregular arches at the 
base were still standing, badly cracked, punctured 
with holes, and covered on the left by huge piles of 
broken masonry. Of the Renaissance building on 

145 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

the same side only a single jagged fragment re- 
mained — that fell before an obus the next after- 
noon. On the right the building retained some- 
thing of its former outline, but it was gutted inside 
and the elaborate details, columns, lintels, arches 
and portico smashed out of all semblance to their 
former graceful beauty. A huge pile of powdered 
white stone was heaped against the lower walls. 
Against it we found another disabled automobile, 
evidently struck during the first bombardment. It 
was not so completely demolished as the first; the 
tires and upholstery were burned off and the stear- 
ing gear wrecked, but its headlights still blinked 
at us uncompromisingly out of the ruins. 

There was only a shapeless mass of calcined stone 
left, like a jagged tooth, to suggest what had been 
the famous tower in the center. White plastered 
walls behind, bits of broken furniture and wainscot- 
ing burned to cinders, great holes in the masonry, 
the points of the arches broken and the remnants 
of the sculpture detail crushed beyond recognition 
— that was all. It was a ghastly sight. 

In all my experience along the front I have seen 
nothing more complete than the wreck of the Hotel 
de Ville. Of all the devastation wrought by the 

146 




r%l 






%v>£z£& -.OBJ -* #' ^ ! 







Notre Dame de Brebieres, Albert 



THE BELEAGUERED CITY OF ARRAS 

Germans there has been no act more wanton than 
the destruction of this beautiful building at Arras. 
The American architect Whitney Warren needs no 
better proof than this of his statement that German 
Kultur cannot lay eyes upon a beautiful thing — -a 
thing more lovely than any architecture of the 
Fatherland — and resist the temptation to destroy 
it. 

The rain increased as we stood in the Petite 
Place, the thunder that followed was almost 
drowned by the roar of artillery from the German 
and French positions to the east and the occasional 
explosion of a shell against the gabled houses. I 
began a sketch from the left arcade, but there was 
a sentry after me in a moment. It was a "mauvais 
cote" he said, and he pointed to the marks of shrap- 
nel on walls and window shutters and to the flag- 
stones littered with fragments of shell. Later, from 
a more sheltered spot beneath the arches at the 
far side of the square we saw a bomb swipe off the 
tiles and part of the chimney of that same old 
gabled house. It was, as the sentry had said, a "bad 
side." 

Blangy is a suburb of Arras. I have never be- 
fore seen the name in print, but whenever I read 

149 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

in the brief communique that there has been "hard 
fighting with grenades and counter-mining in the 
neighborhood of Arras," I think of Blangy. We 
crept gradually up to it late in the afternoon. The 
boyau, or communicating trench, commenced in the 
rear of a very-much-shot-up factory building on 
the edge of the town. So gradually we approached, 
in fact, that we were well within the trenches be- 
fore we realized that we were in the actual front 
line. 

We encountered soldiers coming out after what 
might be called a hard day's work. Others followed 
us in carrying long poles on their shoulders, sus- 
pended from the middle of the pole a steaming 
earthen pot of soup for the evening meal. There 
were others with pickaxes, intrenching tools and 
sand bags to bolster up a threatened spot. The air 
was charged with moisture, and as we stumbled 
forward — the trenches were rough and slippery 
with mud — we were sprayed with drops of water 
from the red poppies hanging over the edge of the 
long ditch. At irregular intervals, either ahead or 
behind, my ears caught a muffled sound like the 
spit of a firecracker exploding on a wet pavement. 
This was the report of the modern French rifle* 

150 



THE BELEAGUERED CITY OF ARRAS 

It seemed a very mild affair when I thought of the 
kick and heavy detonation of the Springfield "45" 
of my militia days. There was little noise, no 
smoke. 

The trenches were exceedingly roomy and they 
were so high that we could keep well below their 
upper crust without stooping. We felt secure and 
reasonably well protected ; it seemed incredible that 
only a short distance away prying German eyes 
were watching the line for the slightest movement. 

As we emerged from the boyau we had to bend 
nearly double; then some dead walls intervened, 
and we could stand upright again. There was 
more whining of shells as we followed a circuitous 
route, taking advantage of a hedge or a garden 
wall wherever possible, up to the brewery at 
Blangy. At this point, I believe, the trenches are 
closer together than at any other in the long line 
from the Vosges to the Channel. To be exact, they 
are twenty yards apart. The Germans occupy a 
small out-building, the French all the rest of the 
establishment. It is the only recorded case where 
the Germans ever occupied a brewery and then 
were forced to give it up again. When they were 
driven outside the walls of Arras they fell back on 

151 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

Blangy. Bit by bit they yielded in the street fight- 
ing, the lines so close together that the German ar- 
tillery, enveloping Arras on three sides, was pow- 
erless to come to the aid of its infantry. 

With hand grenade or bayonet the enemy was 
backed out of Blangy until (on this visit of July 
7th) he was clinging by his toes to the battle-scarred 
out-building in the far corner of the brewery. 
These brewery buildings are like a Chinese puzzle 
— a confusion of vats, store rooms, sub-cellars, 
broken walls, rafters burned to a crisp, sand bag 
entrenchments, corrugated iron bomb proofs, 
ditches and crumpled brick and stone. Such a maze 
it is that the French themselves do not know it. 
The field hospital is in a protected spot in a sub- 
cellar behind a brewer's vat. For the benefit of 
those who carry the wounded, at every doubtful 
turning the way to it is marked on the walls by a 
red cross with a red arrow beneath it. 

Near the far end of the brewery is an old house. 
The dormer window is blown out, leaving a gaping 
hole, and the tiles on the roof shot off. We climbed 
up to the garret by a broken stairway littered with 
discharged cartridges and broken bits of plaster. 
We stooped low, to avoid being seen as we passed 

152 



THE BELEAGUERED CITY OF ARRAS 

the opening where the dormer window had been. 
A soldier had cut a larger hole in the interstices 
between the boarding. Through it we could 
glimpse a gray ditch sixty yards away, wagons in 
the ditch as a barricade — these were the trenches 
of the enemy — shell-torn houses on each side, 
a clump of trees beyond and round white puffs 
of shrapnel hanging close to the hills in the dis- 
tance. There was no sign of life in the German 
line, but you had a mysterious feeling that thou- 
sands of unseen eyes were watching you. Then, 
apparently without the slightest excuse, for there 
was no one at all in sight, there would be the spit of 
a rifle in the French trenches at our feet. 

I carefully poked my camera through the hole 
between the boarding and pressed the bulb. Then 
we dived under the opening where the dormer win- 
dow had been, and quietly made our way down the 
rickety stairway. 

A little further on we reached the point where 
the French and German lines almost meet. There 
was a hush over everything. We were cautioned 
to whisper and to walk on tiptoe. The sand bag 
barricades somehow gave us an abnormal sense of 
protection. There were, to be sure, the desultory 

153 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

reports of rifle fire from both sides and occasionally 
a soldier immediately in front of us would launch 
a hand grenade, just as a boy would swing a crab 
apple off the end of a stick. Beyond the topmost 
line of the trench a shattered gable, with skeleton 
chimneys and blackened rafters, showed through 
the drizzle of rain. This was the German line — 
not further away than the width of a city street, 
so close that we felt almost as though we could 
reach out and touch the enemy. The poilus, with 
their heads against the butts of their rifles, were 
alert and watchful. But I experienced a greater 
feeling of security here than in the garret with 
the narrow slits between the boards and the open 
space where the dormer window had been. 



154 



CHAPTER VIII 

BACK OF THE FRONT — DOULLENS AND ALBERT 

As the afternoon wore on we tiptoed out of the 
brewery at Blangy. We walked as though we were 
walking on eggs. Beneath us were subterranean 
passages leading up to the enemy's works, and, for 
aught we knew to the contrary, beneath us were 
other subterranean passages leading from the ene- 
my's works up to us. This tiptoeing over a mined 
area is an uncanny experience. The intrepid offi- 
cer who had us in charge explained the necessity 
for it. He said that heavy footfalls or the stamp- 
ing of feet might betray the exact position of the 
French trenches to German sappers burrowing 
toward them underground. 

Imagine night' duty in this region of mines and 
counter mines — not knowing when a fuse in an 
underground tunnel may be touched off under your 
feet preparatory to a general advance! And im- 
agine living day in and day out so close to the 
enemy that he might as well be living in the same 

155 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

house with you — so close that neither side dare 
search the positions with its artillery for fear of 
getting its own men! 

I thought of this as our escort, gallant, calmly 
resourceful, having brought us safely to the out- 
skirts of Arras, stopped and saluted. We clicked 
heels, saluted, wished him "bon chance 3 ' and he re- 
turned to his post in the brewery at Blangy. 
Through deserted streets and shell-pitted walls we 
made our way back to the waiting motor cars. The 
artillery fire from the enveloping slopes had 
dropped to an occasional desultory report as we 
silently slipped out of the city through the mist. 

Men who daily risk their lives under the murder- 
ous fire of modern artillery for twelve hours out of 
the twenty-four look naturally upon the driving of 
a motor car at cup-race speed as a pleasant relaxa- 
tion. Our rush back to Doullens from Arras was 
an appropriately exciting finish to an eventful day. 
We had left the whining shells behind us. Travel- 
ing at a speed of from fifty to sixty miles an hour, 
our limousine rocked about like a ship in a gale. 
What though the roads be crowded with commis- 
sary wagons and other traffic back of the front! 
We seldom slowed up. In one place we darted 

156 




The Rue du Bourg, Doullens 



BACK OF THE FRONT 

through an opening between two carts with a six- 
inch clearance on either side. At the time we were 
doing just under sixty miles an hour, and those of 
us in the rear seats had pushed up the rug on the 
floor of the car in our individual efforts to apply 
the brakes. But our military chauffeur was as un- 
concerned as though he had been edging his way 
slowly through the traffic of Fifth Avenue. 

The guide books give Doullens a population of 
over 6,000. Since the early days of the war this 
number has been vastly increased if one considers 
the various repair shops and depots for munitions 
established in the neighborhood and the great num- 
ber of troops billeted upon the town itself and the 
villages close by. It is an important point for the 
distribution of commissary supplies and the move- 
ment of reserves, for the route nationale from the 
coast to Arras and the highway leading north from 
Amiens to St. Pol cross here. It was on the ancient 
post road from Paris to Calais. This is the route 
followed by "The Three Musketeers" in Dumas' ro- 
mance, when d'Artagnan made the flying trip from 
Paris to London to recover the Queen's jewels from 
the Duke of Buckingham. Dumas sent him from 
Paris to Calais by galloping steed in little more 

159 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

time than it takes nowadays to cover the distance 
by automobile. This was before the time when a 
writer of fiction had to consider road conditions and 
railway schedules in planning his hero's exploits. 
But modern motorists — if they were well advised — 
eschewed the Amiens-St. Omer route in favor of 
the one to the west through Abbeville and Bou- 
logne. 

Doullens is a flat little place with an ancient cita- 
del and a Town Hall of more recent date. The 
tower of the Town Hall terminates in a peculiar 
slate-covered cupola. In some of the narrow side 
streets are picturesque half-timbered houses and 
there is a weatherbeaten stone church of the fif- 
teenth century on the Rue du Bourg. In these war 
times the streets are dusty and dirty — there is none 
of the spick-and-span toy-town appearance here 
one finds in the French villages further away from 
the front. 

General Foch established his headquarters in the 
town while directing the movement that drove the 
Germans out of Arras and pushed them back on the 
hills to the east. 

During the stay of our party of correspondents 
in the famous Artois sector, we went each day as 

160 



BACK OF THE FRONT 

close as possible to the first-line trenches by auto- 
mobile. The final stages of the trip were always 
accomplished on foot. Each night we returned to 
Doullens and divided ourselves between its two 
quaint little hotels. The names of the hotels are at 
least unusual. In one of them, the "Hotel Quatre 
Fils Aymon," we all messed. Those of us who 
could not find accommodations there were quartered 
at the "Hotel des Bons Enfants." The latter was 
dirtier — naturally, since it was the more pictur- 
esque. It harbored more flies than I have ever seen 
in a small hotel before. But we of the "Enfants" 
didn't mind. We were so fagged out at the end of 
each day that our hard beds were of down, the 
bolsters soft pillows and our tallow dips might have 
been tungsten lights for all we saw of them in the 
short time it took to undress. 

Thirty kilometers away from Doullens is the 
little town of Albert. It was not a tourist center 
and was unknown to travelers except for the few 
pilgrims that came to worship at the shrine of Notre 
Dame de Brebieres. The shrine was bombarded 
by the German guns in the early months of the 
war, and the story of the statue of the Virgin that 
crowned the belfry is known all over France. 

163 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

Time was when a narrow-gage railroad followed 
the road from Doullens to Albert. Now the nar- 
row-gage railway is abandoned and the road be- 
tween the two places is one of many turnings and 
sudden hills. It crosses the plateau between the 
Authie and the Ancre. 

The little Roman-Byzantine church of Notre 
Dame de Brebieres is an old building recently re- 
stored. In its restoration it was entirely redec- 
orated. It was noted in the neighborhood because 
it had an imposing basilica and a high tower sur- 
mounted by a golden statue of the Virgin holding 
the Child. The town lies some three kilometers to 
the west of the battle front. A small manufactur- 
ing place on a river bank near a pretty waterfall, 
it would not, in the ordinary course of events, have 
been singled out as a center of military activity. 
Shortly after the first bombardment of Albert com- 
menced, it was noticed that the church of Notre 
Dame, instead of becoming the usual target for the 
enemy's artillery, was miraculously escaping un- 
touched. 

The rest of the town, factories, shops and houses, 
bit by bit was swept by the German guns. When- 
ever a movement of troops in camions, or motor 

164 



BACK OF THE FRONT 

trucks, commenced, the enemy was aware of it; 
whenever a yellow motor car, apparently contain- 
ing staff officers, came into the town the streets 
through which it passed were sprinkled with shrap- 
nel. A spy, no less. And naturally he was posted 
in the most conspicuous position in the place — the 
belfry of the church tower. From this vantage 
point he signaled any event of military importance 
in the streets below to the German batteries in the 
hills above the Somme Valley at Suzanne. 

The fate of the spy can be imagined. He had 
continued his activities unnoticed until the end of 
October. The townspeople are not quite sure of 
the date of his passing, but they all know that 
after the beginning of November the fire of the 
German guns was concentrated on the church of 
Notre Dame de Brebieres. Albert, as we motored 
to the town from the Acheux road on the northwest, 
presented the same picture of devastation that 
marks the progress of German arms throughout 
the valleys of northern France. We drove into the 
Grande Place. I had never seen the Grande Place 
before. It had evidently been the typical square of 
the smaller towns of Artois and Picardy. A band- 
stand in the center, a few half-timbered houses scat- 

165 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

tered among the commoner ones of brick and stone, 
dormer windows with pinnacles pushing themselves 
out of the tiled roofs and, dominating the open 
space, the lofty belfry of the church. 

Now many of the houses were shells. There were 
the same blackened timbers and skeleton-like roof- 
trees, the same deserted streets that you become 
accustomed to in all the villages close to the front. 
If, through the activities of the spy in the belfry, 
Notre Dame was immune at first, it has been badly 
battered since. The German gunners evidently 
tried to make up for lost time. Its buttresses are 
broken down, heavy projectiles have swept the 
basilica, smashed the altar and crushed the vaulted 
dome of the transept. All of the stained glass win- 
dows are broken. The sacristy is blown in and 
the organ pipes lie in a twisted mass among the 
debris. 

An obus struck the golden Virgin on her lofty 
perch. She toppled over, but instead of falling 
hung suspended at right angles over the empty 
space below. In her outstretched hands she still 
held the Divine Child. She was offering It to the 
people of Albert, they said. And they came to 
stand under the tower and to gaze wonderingly up- 

166 




Effects of shell fire and explosive bombs over the great 
portals of Arras Cathedral 



BACK OF THE FRONT 

ward. For a long time she remained at this curious 
angle until another shell brought her to earth. The 
golden Virgin no longer dominates the surrounding 
countryside. But her dramatic appeal has stirred 
the imagination of the people of Albert, and the 
violation of the sanctuary has aroused a greater 
feeling of resentment than any other act of wil- 
ful destruction in the valley of the Ancre. 

Johnson brought with him from Paris some pack- 
ages that Madame X was sending to her hus- 
band, the General. His headquarters were some- 
where in our sector. We were at dinner the second 
night at Doullens. It was a very good dinner after 
a trying day. We messed in a private room at the 
Quatre Fils Aymon, and for a special servant we 
had a small maid. She was rather embarrassed at 
having to serve, as she thought, so many distin- 
guished strangers. She got away with the earlier 
courses, the soup in its big tureen and a "trout 
of the river." But she was overcome when it came 
to serving the wine. The landlady — she was pa- 
tron, chef and boots, there were no men about the 
place — had produced musty bottles from the cellar. 
No one seemed to know how long they had been 
there, certainly not the landlady. The wine was of 

169 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

an unknown vintage. But to have it ordered by 
one of the distinguished guests was something of an 
event. The maid tried to serve it in wicker baskets. 
But there were no wicker baskets. The corks were 
stubborn, they refused to be drawn. In her efforts 
the contents of the bottles were being shaken up. 
At this point she was demoted as sommellier and 
with a face red with confusion she disappeared in 
the direction of the kitchen to fetch another course. 
She is probably still thinking of the handsome offi- 
cer who volunteered to shoulder some of her respon- 
sibilities. 

Just after the little maid had retired a motor 
drove into the courtyard with a loud crackle of ex- 
plosions from its open exhaust. It was a messenger 
sent after the packages Johnson had brought from 
Paris for General X . The messenger ap- 
peared in the doorway in the person of Caro Del- 
vaille, the painter. It was an extraordinary meet- 
ing. He and Johnson had known each other in 
Paris and New York, and before the war broke out 
Del Vaille was at work on some portraits in St. 
Paul. He spoke affectionately of St. Paul and of 
my friends there. Like Hofbauer, he wondered if 
he would ever see America again. He was dressed 

170 



BACK OF THE FRONT 

in the uniform of an infantry private, with the in- 
signia of the Legion of Honor on his breast. I can 
think of nothing that would better show the democ- 
racy of the French army than this little dinner 
party — two staff captains, a lieutenant, a sous lieu- 
tenant, sl corporal, a private, and — though we didn't 
count so much — two English and three American 
correspondents. 

The room was full of smoke when Delvaille rose 
to go. He opened the window. It was a pitch- 
black night with an occasional glare of light from 
the rockets in the direction of Arras. Then the 
motor drew up at the doorway, he took his pack- 
ages, saluted and went out into the night. We 
could hear the chug of his motor growing fainter 
as he drove off into the darkness. 

We of the "Hotel of the Good Infants" could 
get no confiture with petit dejeuner in the morning. 
There was not even a small boy to be sent for it. 
So we went ourselves. We sought out a little 
grocer and bought a jar of home-made honey. The 
grocer waited on us in his uniform, his coat tails 
caught back, his red trousers tucked in his boots, 
his kepi for the time being on a shelf. He was very 
simple about it. He was a Territorial. His com- 

171 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

pany was stationed in the neighborhood, and when 
he was off duty he put rifle and bayonet aside to 
resume his place behind his counter. 

The proprietor of a cafe in Paris was in civilian 
attire when we left him one night. In the morning 
we found him in full marching equipment. In his 
hands he carried a paper package containing waf- 
fles. The specialite of his cafe was waffles, and 
he was going to leave these for some friends in the 
hospital before he took train back to the front. 
These sons of the people jump in and out of their 
uniforms and attend to the serious business of kill- 
ing men and to their own small affairs with equal 
unconcern. Which is probably one of the reasons 
why the whole world has been amazed at the way 
France has shown her claws in the Great War. 

When we entered the shop of the fighting grocer 
the streets of Doullens were deserted except for a 
few market carts turning out of the Rue du Bourg. 
When we came out there was a complete transfor- 
mation. An endless procession of motor trucks was 
passing through the street, each one carrying from 
twenty to forty soldiers. They kept their regular 
company distances, the officers and orderlies at the 
flanks in smaller cars or voiturettes. They came by 

172 




A motor car destroyed by shell fire in the ruins of the 
Hotel de Ville, Arras — July 7 



BACK OF THE FRONT 

in clouds of dust, company after company, battalion 
after battalion, regiment after regiment. In gen- 
eral appearance the trucks all looked alike, wooden 
seats along the sides, dusty green curtains, a top 
like a prairie schooner, and the regimental number 
painted on the tailboard. The motors were of all 
makes. I felt a little homesick when I noticed our 
own familiar marks on many of the bonnets in 
the long procession — Whites, Kelly-Springfields, 
Packards, Garfords. The line seemed never-end- 
ing. The poilus hung over the tailboards and joked 
with the crowd on the sidewalk. They were all 
moving up to the front with the same cheerful spirit 
of adventure we had noticed among them every- 
where. They begged me to take their photographs. 
I suppose they should have sung "Tipperary." I 
never heard "Tipperary" sung at all during my ex- 
perience in the French lines. 

The last of the ammunition and commissary 
trucks bringing up the rear rounded the turn and 
disappeared behind the houses. The long proces- 
sion had somehow reminded me of a circus parade 
— without the horses. The clouds of dust rolled 
away. The market carts came back into the Rue 
du Bourg, and Doullens settled back into the ordi- 

175 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

nary business of the day. In the comparatively 
short space of two hours 20,000 men had passed 
through the town. Where they had come from or 
whither they were going we knew not. With rap- 
idity and celerity an army division had been chang- 
ing position. Silently it had rolled through the 
streets and as silently vanished. There was no 
neighing of horses, no champing of bits, no march- 
ing footsteps on the cobbles, no sound of trumpet 
or drum. Only the rhythmic purr of the throbbing 
motors and the steady deadened rumble of rubber- 
shod wheels. We had been witnessing an exhibition 
of the utility of the motor truck in warfare. Might- 
ier than the chariots of the Caesars, as relentless as 
the thrusts of Napoleon, was this forced march 
by the modern method of transportation. 



176 



CHAPTER IX 

ONE DAY (JULY 8) IN THE ARTOIS SECTOR 

The roads seemed rather deserted as our small 
procession — pilot car, three others, and an empty- 
one in reserve — left Doullens by the route nation- 
ale. We followed our former road as far as Lu- 
cheux; we again passed under the ancient town 
gate, around the chateau, and then branched off to 
the north. 

Early in the morning, at Doullens, we had seen 
a division *of reserves moving up to the front in 
motor-trucks. At Avesnes le Comte we passed 
a regiment returning after its duty in the 
trenches. One was all spirit and buoyancy and 
enthusiasm, the other all spirit — everywhere you 
notice this same exaltation among the French 
troops — but the faces of the men were worn, and 
they marched with leaden steps. In the van was a 
battery of "75's," the artillerymen in slickers and 
capes — it was another rainy morning — behind it a 
file of pack-mules, with the various parts of a mi- 

177 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

trailleuse — barrel, tripod, shield, and ammunition- 
boxes — strapped on their backs. An officer stopped 
and saluted us. His men were very tired, he said. 
The usual shift is three days in the trenches and 
three days at the rear to rest and sleep; but they 
had been fighting in an exposed position at the 
front for nearly six days without relief. They had 
come twenty kilometers since daybreak, and there 
were still five to march to the village upon which 
they were billeted. He gave a command. Trum- 
pets were whipped out, and with the drums beating, 
the tired poilus bucked up, and the regiment swung 
through the narrow street to that fine old marching- 
song of the French army, "Sambre et Meuse." 

It was the only music I ever heard at the front. 
In times of peace I had known it wherever troops 
were quartered — in Avignon, Vernon, Angouleme, 
and Nancy. It revived old memories. How little 
I thought in my motor tours that I should hear it 
again so close to the lines where France and Ger- 
many were at grips in the greatest war in his- 
tory! 

Again we turned north by a small country road. 
We crossed the route nationale connecting Arras 
and St. Pol, and breasted a rise above Aubigny. 

178 



ONE DAY (JULY 8) IN THE ARTOIS SECTOR 

The town lay down in a little valley, a soft haze 
dimming the outlines of its houses and the ruined 
tower of its old gray church. The whole sweep of 
the plain unfolded itself from time to time as we 
skirted a ridge — Mont-St.-Eloi on its wooded slope, 
Carency, Souchez, Neuville St. Vaast. We seldom 
appeared in the open; the chauffeurs knew all the 
turns in this labyrinth of byways, and took ad- 
vantage of every ridge and knoll and gully. 

It was exceedingly hot; we had left the showers 
of the early morning behind us. The sun shone out 
of a cloudless sky, but a humid mist clung close to 
the earth and blurred the landscape. It would have 
been hard to locate each battle-scarred little village 
except for its ruined church tower. The towers — 
what was left of them — rose protectingly above the 
adjoining rafters. Sometimes they were calcined 
white by the flames, sometimes smashed into pic- 
turesque remnants by the unerring marksmanship 
of the enemy's gunners. What a harvest of ruined 
churches marks the advance of the German hosts 
into France! 

The stretch of road that crosses the plateau of 
Bouvigny is directly under the fire of German 
batteries on another slope to the north. Any doubt 

181 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

that we might have had about this was dispelled 
when, at the little village of Bouvigny, a dragoon 
stepped out and halted us. He still wore the hel- 
met with its horsehair plume, but the helmet was 
covered with khaki, so that it might not shine in the 
sunlight. Our objective point, the Bois de Bou- 
vigny, a mass of woodland, lay two kilometers 
ahead, across the crest of the plateau. The cuiras- 
sier lined the cars up and then clicked off the min- 
utes on his wrist- watch like the starter of the Van- 
derbilt Cup race and sent us away at five-minute in- 
tervals. Cars that distance apart would not kick up 
the amount of dust nor offer the same target to the 
enemy that would have been afforded had our four 
motors crossed together in single file. 

Johnson and Captain Y went first; I fol- 
lowed with Bennett and Captain X ; Roberts 

and Mair came five minutes later with two other of- 
ficers. Bennett and I were in the big Renault. I 
had never before traveled so fast in a motor; I never 
remember seeing a motor go so fast except in a cup 
race. We had all safely made the dash across the 
open space before the German observers discovered 
us. 

Running the gantlet across the zone of fire was 

182 



ONE DAY (JULY 8) IN THE ARTOIS SECTOR 

an exciting experience to us. We all breathed more 
easily after it had been accomplished. Some one 
spoke of it after we had reached the cool and shady 
recesses of the Bois. 

Then they showed us the "Baby Peugeot." To 
the driver of this little machine, who had been mak- 
ing the run almost daily since the French forces 
occupied the position last November, it had be- 
come as much a routine task as the carrying of let- 
ters by a rural free-delivery postman in an out-of- 
the-way district at home. 

The "Baby Peugeot" takes the place of the old- 
fashioned despatch-bearer of the war melodramas. 
No more of your orderly dashing up to headquar- 
ters and pulling his foaming horse back on his 
haunches while he delivers an unintelligible message 
to the commander-in-chief. Now the orders that 
cannot be sent by telephone or wireless are intrusted 
to the despatch-bearer in his little racer. It is 
painted dark gray, hangs close to the road, and 
runs like the wind. The French prefer this type of 
voiturette to the motor-cycles commonly used by 
the British. 

Two German prisoners captured early in the 
morning had been brought up to the Bois de Bou- 

183 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

vigny. They were soldierly looking chaps, and 
they evidently felt their position keenly. As they 
sat in the half-light of the men's quarters, Johnson 
and Roberts tried to talk to them in German. 
There was a question who were the most embar- 
rassed, Johnson and Roberts or the German prison- 
ers. 

There is a little narrow-gage railway running 
through the woods. It has sidings and switches, 
and the small flat-cars are pushed by hand. It 
leads from the telephone centrals, stables, mess- 
rooms, and "garage for automobiles" (so reads the 
sign) to the boyaux, or communicating trenches 
that lie beyond the edge of the Bois. Down the lit- 
tle railway they carry ammunition to the men at the 
front, and back on the flat-cars they carry the 
wounded. On the one trip they sow the seed, and 
on the other they bring back the harvest. 

The first impression of this wood of Bouvigny 
is one of absolute quiet. Heavy foliage hangs over- 
head, and there is a refreshing coolness in the sha- 
dows. The bomb-proofs, arsenals, and wattled bar- 
ricades are of the general color of their surround- 
ings, and would be hard to detect by a scouting 
aeroplane. As in the other artillery positions we 

184 



ONE DAY (JULY 8) IN THE ARTOIS SECTOR 

had seen, the stables and dugouts are hidden by 
freshly cut green saplings. 

As we walked through the woods to the boyaux 
there was only the muffled sound of guns; an ar- 
tillery engagement was taking place some distance 
away in the valley near Souchez. Suddenly, with- 
out warning, there was the loud roar as of an ex- 
press train crossing a trestle. It was followed by 
another and another as German shells of large cali- 
ber swept by over our heads. A column of smoke 
rose where one struck among the trees in the dis- 
tance. Later we saw the hole it had excavated. 
Not far away was an arsenal in a sub-cellar, with 
a sheet-iron roof. It did not increase one's sense of 
security to picture the fireworks that would follow 
had it landed among the bombs and high explosives 
in the arsenal. A few seconds after the Germans 
opened, the reply came from a battery of "75's" on 
another hillside. These shells too passed over our 
heads, and for a while the cool, green forest echoed 
the thunder of the rival batteries. 

A number of officers had joined us to go down 
into the advance trenches. They are always eager 
for an excuse to see what is doing on the firing line. 
We passed many graves in the shadows. At every 

187 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

one we stopped and saluted. As we gained the 
open there were many more graves, but they were 
not so well cared for. The boyau led down a slight 
incline. On the open hillside at the edge of the 
Bois de Bouvigny the ground was an indescribable 
mass of wattled barriers, barbed-wire entangle- 
ments, shell-pits, chevauw-de-frise, knapsacks, 
spiked helmets, and occasionally a suggestive boot- 
leg upturned toward the sky. We were now on the 
grand e per on of Notre Dame de Lorette, which has 
witnessed some of the bitterest fighting of the war. 
Here and there among the debris beyond the 
trenches were little signs on sticks, with a warning 
for sappers and grave-diggers: "Look out! Live 
shell!" They marked the place where bombs had 
fallen, but had failed to explode in the spongy 
earth. The sun beat down on the open space, and 
the watchful soldiers in their heavy gray-blue over- 
coats and full equipment looked uncomfortably hot. 
The French trenches were constructed as if to with- 
stand a long siege. They were braced with timbers 
and sandbags; there were many caves and under- 
ground shelters for the men, bomb-proofs, and the 
usual zigzags that may be used in flanking as well 
as in a frontal attack. 

188 



ONE DAY (JULY 8) IN THE ARTOIS SECTOR 

At the point of one of the salients was a small 
observation-platform. It was supported by pieces 
of sapling. An officer, squatting on the rough 
boards, was directing with the aid of a periscope 
the fire of one of the batteries in the rear. To and 
fro in the traverses we scrambled, ducking our 
heads at occasional openings. The order came to 
stoop low. We crawled out of the French lines, 
and, aided by the slight haze that still clung close 
to the earth and hid our movements from the en- 
emy's observers, made our way gingerly across the 
open space on the hillside up to the battered 
trenches captured from the Germans two weeks 
before. 

The change was so abrupt that it seemed like 
stepping from one country to another. The char- 
acter of the trenches was entirely different. In- 
stead of being bolstered with sandbags, they were 
shored up with timbers, many of which had been 
smashed by shell-fire. With -a constant rain of 
shells all day and all night, there had been no chance 
to clean up. Parts of bodies, boots, hands, or blood- 
stained underwear, hung out of the earth walls of 
the ditch. In some cases the dead had been simply 
pitched out on the bank and partly covered with 

189 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

dirt and chloride of lime. Black clouds of flies 
swarmed everywhere, and the stench was intoler- 
able. 

All the hillside is now in the hands of the French. 
They have gained at the rate of a hundred yards a 
month since March 1, and in the last attack, the 
one of which we were seeing the gruesome evidence, 
they pushed the enemy out of his second line of 
defense and forced him across the Carency valley 
beyond Ablain St. Nazaire. At a certain point of 
the captured German line, on what is called the 
lower e per on j was a small cannon, its muzzle just 
raised above the emplacements, and covered with 
brown canvas to take off the reflection of the sun's 
rays. Beyond was the site where once had stood 
the pretty chapel of Notre Dame de Lorette, with 
a view commanding the entire valley. The wide ex- 
panse beyond the smoking ruins was formerly a 
smiling hillside covered with trees and green turf. 
Now it seemed like a fragment of one of D ore's 
drawings for Dante's Inferno. Trees were gone, 
grass was gone, there were only rocks and stones 
and the never-ending ridges where shells had 
plowed through the sod. A heap of crumbled stone 
and brick where the chapel had stood ; a white stone, 

190 




o 



> 
< 

bJD 
3 



"5 



ONE DAY (JULY 8) IN THE ARTOIS SECTOR 

evidently a corner-stone, with "N. D. de Lorette" 
on it, showed through the debris. 

I can imagine no more impressive preachment 
against the mighty powers that were unloosed when 
the Great War broke out than the grisly landscape 
that surrounds the ruins of the chapel from this 
farthest salient on the grand eperon. Under the 
broken rocks and the fresh-cut furrows one felt the 
writhings of some unseen power. It was as though 
a tortured monster beneath was slowly breaking 
through the earth's crust. There were fragments 
of guns, of bloody shirts and tunics, spiked helmets 
and red caps, a skeleton hand sticking above 
the edge of a great pit torn out by a "marmite," 
craters where shells had exploded and exhumed the 
dead — a giant caldron constantly stirred by the 
pitiless fire from the German guns across the valley. 
Not a leaf, not a small stretch of turf, in sight, 
nothing but brown earth and devastation, and over 
all soft, white clouds moving lazily across a gray- 
blue sky. 

We had nearly completed the circle around the 

hillside when Captain Y scrambled out of the 

ditch to show us the irregular, white German line 
in the valley below and the position of one of the 

193 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

enemy's batteries on a wooded slope above. To do 
this, he exposed the upper part of his body above 
the trench. An observer in the German line tele- 
phoned back to the battery. The guns opened fire 
a minute later, the first shell — shrapnel — appar- 
ently exploding over the heads of Johnson and the 
others in our vanguard. I had only time to hope 
that they had escaped before the Germans opened 
with guns of larger caliber, and dense clouds of 
black smoke rose where they exploded against the 
side of the hill or in the trees beyond. Lieutenant 
T left the others and came running back to an- 
nounce, with a chuckle and an evident show of re- 
lief: "Per sonne de blesse! Personne de blesse!" 
I thought with what sepulchral seriousness the offi- 
cers in a military play would have said, "Thank 
God! nobody wounded!" 

Captain X urged us to step faster. The 

nearest bomb-proof shelter was half a kilometer 
away and we had to make a run for it. It was one 
thing to feel that you were an infinitesimal unit 
within a great zone of fire; it was another to know 
that you were the definite target at which shells were 
being directed with all the deadly precision of mod- 
ern military science. 

194 












* 

. v 



Shrapnel and shell, Bois de Bouvigny, July 8 



ONE DAY (JULY 8) IN THE ARTOIS SECTOR 

Again with the warning roar of an express train 
a shell hurtled by so close above our heads that we 
could feel the onrush of air and the hot breath of 
it. An irresistible impulse made us raise our heads 
above the near side of the trench to watch the crim- 
son flare and the mass of earth and stone thrown 
up by the explosion. 

The surface of the trench was very rough, and 
there were many loose stones. I stumbled and fell 
over my camera and sketching tools. An obliging 
private rushed up and put me on my feet again. 
Dodging and clinging close to the near side of the 
trench whenever the scream of a shell announced its 
approach, we made slow progress. After the con- 
tinual sprinting and dodging, I was completely 
winded. I could run no farther, not if all the shells 
in the ammunition-cases on the distant slope fell 
directly in my path. At the time I felt no emotion 
beyond a mild resentment against the Germans 
who had made me run so far when I was out of 
condition. I pulled myself together, and with a 
feeble show of dignity walked deliberately, blow- 
ing like a porpoise, up to the bomb-proof where the 
others had taken shelter. 

When the German fire had slackened and finally 

197 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

died away, we edged our way cautiously through 
the last half -furlong of the first-line trenches, and 
crept into the grateful shadow of the Bois de Bou- 
vigny. Woods never looked cooler or more invit- 
ing. We had luncheon in the faisanderie, in the lit- 
tle dining-room of the gamekeeper's lodge. There 
were lithographs and wood-cuts of religious sub- 
jects on the walls. The pictures were all askew, 
and the plaster was cracked from the concussion 
of a shell that had exploded outside without doing 
any further damage. The menu included hard- 
boiled eggs, cold meats, salad, cheese, and red 
wine, all served by our chauffeurs, who had 
brought the luncheon-hampers with us from 
Doullens. 

I experienced a little thrill as we descended into 
the boyau leading into the Spahi position in the 
afternoon. Two British "Tommies" were coming 
out of the trenches just as we were going in. They 
had placed a new big gun in the woods near by, 
where it would cross the French fire and enfilade the 
Germans. They were very proud of it. They were 
waiting for orders from the general commanding to 
try it on the "Boches" in the morning. The French 
and British lines come together just north of this 

198 



ONE DAY (JULY 8) IN THE ARTOIS SECTOR 

point, with their heavy artillery concentrated on 
the enemy; the firing of the guns crosses like the 
laces of a boot. This new British field-piece was 
commanded by a brother of George Mair, who was 
with us. He and the two artillerymen exchanged 
commonplaces exactly as though they had met in 
Piccadilly or Pall Mall. The war was theirs, and 
they might be as casual as they chose about it; but 
to me the encounter awakened a deeper emotion be- 
cause it was the first time I had heard English 
spoken as the native tongue of any of the men at 
the front. 

The Spahi camp was very interesting. When I 
saw them I thought of Shreyer's "Powder Play," 
and of other pictures exploiting the wonderful 
horsemanship of one of the finest cavalry arms in 
the French service. The famous African cavalry 
is now dismounted, and is used principally for night 
attacks. The dash and courage of the men and 
their weird cries in the charge have made them of 
the greatest value in this phase of modern trench 
warfare. When they are not busy taking positions 
at the point of the bayonet, they live in caves on the 
hillside, like their own Tunisian troglodytes. At 
the crest of the ridge above their intrenchments are 

199 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

the slender poles of the field telephone and meshes 
of barbed wire. The Spahis are continually under 
the crackle of the shells from the German position 
in one direction and the French batteries in the 
other. In a cave deeper than the ones they have 
dug for themselves they have made a refuge for 
the pet of the regiment, a fox-terrier dog. She has 
three puppies born under fire, and is bringing them 
up as unconcernedly as she would in a peaceful ken- 
nel many miles back of the front. One of the 
men dived into the cave and brought out the pup- 
pies to let me take their photograph ; but the mother 
was self-conscious. She took their heads in her 
mouth one by one, and carried them back into the 
dugout. 

There is a wonderful view from the edge of the 
south eperon of Notre Dame de Lorette; a pano- 
rama of undulating fields, of valleys, wooded 
slopes, bifurcating roadways, and half-burned vil- 
lages stretches out at one's feet. Below, a little to 
the left, is Ablain St. Nazaire. There were dense 
smoke clouds hanging over the town, with the occa- 
sional white puffs of exploding shrapnel. Another 
bitter fight was going on for possession of the fa- 
mous pump that provides the only fresh water in 

200 




A famous 
Sketch map of the Artois sector fi 







ground 

Notre Dame de Lorette hillside 



ONE DAY (JULY 8) IN THE ARTOIS SECTOR 

the neighborhood. It was hard to believe that the 
irregular white mass of stone above the trees was 
all that was left of the former small cathedral. 
Smoke rose from the ruined houses, and the deaf- 
ening detonations of the guns from the valley 
echoed through the ravine at our side. We could 
see little mites of men walking along the broken 
road from the burning village beyond to the foot 
of the hill at our feet. These were the brancardiers, 
or Red- Cross men, carrying the wounded back on 
their little two-wheeled carts to the field hospital 
hidden behind the hill. 

Farther away, at the end of a white road, was 
Souchez, basking in the sunlight. There was a lull 
in the firing there ; the main attack for the afternoon 
was directed at Ablain, and Souchez and its famous 
sugar mill were for the time being given a respite. 
On a line between Ablain and Souchez, but so far 
away that we could not locate it through the dust 
and smoke of the shells, was the Labyrinthe, the 
terrible maze of mines and counter-mines, of 
trenches, bomb-proofs, and redoubts lying flat on 
the plain. In the middle distance, beyond the 
clumps of trees that mark the winding of the river, 
was Carency; beyond it lay Neuville St. Vaast, now 

205 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

little more than a tomb of a village. Far off to the 
right was Aubigny, as yet not badly damaged. 
Nearer, partly hidden by a ridge, was Mont-St.- 
Eloi. Holding its place, as it properly should, in 
the center between Neuville and Mont-St.-Eloi, was 
La Targette ; beyond it, though it could not be seen 
because of the haze, was the great objective in the 
German scheme of strategy, Arras. 

It was typical of the campaign in this sector that 
there was no general engagement. The volleys of 
the guns for the time being were concentrated on 
Ablain, except for some desultory cannonading 
over the Labyrinthe. By evening the scene might 
shift to Neuville St. Vaast, in the morning change 
to the hand-to-hand combats about the sugar mill 
at Souchez, and at night there might be another 
shift to a bayonet attack on our own hillside of 
Notre Dame de Lorette. 

We began the descent down the hill very care- 
fully. The sun was oppressively hot. It was a 
steep and tortuous path through the communicat- 
ing trenches to a point at the bottom where two 
roads meet. One, which is partly sunken at its 
nearest point, winds down over the slope ahead, the 
other leads to Ablain St. Nazaire on the left. There 

206 



ONE DAY (JULY 8) IN THE ARTOIS SECTOR 

was a large bomb-proof cave just above the foot 
of the hill. In its depths the air was much cooler 
than on the plains outside, and its wide opening 
afforded a splendid view. We went inside to wait 
until the others should return from Ablain St. Na- 
zaire. I was awakened out of a doze by Captain 

X . Waves of heat radiated from the corrugated 

roof of a dugout beyond. Through them the land- 
scape swayed like a painted canvas panorama in a 
theater. The captain called my attention to a 
clump of trees standing out against the skyline on 
the right. Emerging slowly from it was one of 
our cars, the big Renault. When it reached the 
open the chauffeur slammed his foot on the accelera- 
tor, and with wide-open exhaust the car came ahead 
over the road on the ridge like a racer in the Grand 
Prix. It reached a point almost opposite us when 
it swerved to the left and came down the partly 
sunken road that ended at our feet, with a cloud of 
dust in its wake. 

The captain remarked that he knew of no surer 
way of drawing the German fire. At the same mo- 
ment the first shot, an explosive bomb, caved in the 
roadway directly behind the car and only a hun- 
dred yards in front of our position. The big Re- 

207 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

nault made another turn when it reached the foot 
of the hill, and pulled up in a safe position behind 
the field-hospital. The German shell had gone wide 
of the mark, but to show their complete control of 
the road (I can imagine no other reason for using 
up ammunition), they placed a second shot at the 
corner where the car had turned, and a third in the 
copse where it had been hidden. They came back 
with another directed at the road in front of us, 
another at the turn, and another in the copse. The 
fourth shell in front of us ricochetted. The impact 
slowed it up, and with the naked eye we could see 
it land in a field, rise a second time, and explode 
as it smashed a tree to pieces in the distance. "One, 
two, three; one, two, three!" from the road to the 
copse and back again, the shells announcing their 
approach with the same sound of an onrushing train 
to which by now we were becoming accustomed; a 
mass of crimson flame where they landed, a column 
of dense black or yellow smoke, then the roar of the 
detonation reached us. It was a weird sensation to 
stand, as it were, on the side-lines, so close to the 
bombardment, yet in comparative safety, and watch 
this fearsome demonstration of the power of mod- 
ern artillery. 

208 



ONE DAY (JULY 8) IN THE ARTOIS SECTOR 

A little Red-Cross cart passed in front of us with 
a wounded man. It came back empty from the 
field hospital. The brancardiers were going back 
to Ablain after more wounded. In the meantime 
one of the attendants had received first aid himself. 
His head was swathed in a bandage, and he could 
see out of only one eye. But he paid no attention 
to his injury; he stopped while I took his photo- 
graph. He asked me to send a proof to him, and 
then he trotted back toward the burning village to 
help his comrades. This is the spirit that wins your 
eternal admiration everywhere along the French 
front. It is the same spirit that inspired an un- 
known hero to shout from the riddled trenches 
where he lay with a handful of fatally wounded 
comrades, "Debout! les morts" ("Stand up! dead 
ones!") And the dead ones — there was not a liv- 
ing poilu in the lot who was not maimed or crippled 
— lifted themselves and fired a final volley. It 
served. The onrushing Germans were checked, 
and in that moment of hesitation the supporting 
mitrailleuses rattled into action. The trenches were 
held, while the "dead ones" lay heaped among the 
sand-bags. 

Our staff captain told it at dinner one night as an 

211 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

old story. I hope I may be forgiven for repeating 
it here. 

The shadows were lengthening when a German 
prisoner was brought in. I expected to find a 
giant of the Prussian Guard. The Prussian Guard 
are the bogie-men, they have a remarkable capacity 
for being everywhere at once. Instead, we saw a 
pitiful wreck of a nineteen-year-old lad, trembling 
like an aspen, burned holes in his gray uniform 
where the bullets had gone through, a racking tu- 
bercular cough, and a wan face covered with dust. 
He had been lost in the trenches for two days with- 
out food or water. He had watched through the 
hell of shells and bombs and colored flares in the 
darkness with only the dead of his company about 
him. At dawn of the second morning he tried to 
find his way back to the German lines, and stumbled 
into the French trenches instead. His captor was 
a stocky little Frenchman from the Midi. He had 
given his own bottle of wine and loaf of bread to 
the prisoner. The poilus gathered about the young 
German, and asked for buttons as souvenirs. He 
begged them to take the sleeve buttons and those 
on his shoulders, but not the ones on the front of 
his tunic. He unbuttoned it, and showed only a 

212 



ONE DAY (JULY 8) IN THE ARTOIS SECTOR 

tattered rag in place of an undershirt. The officers 
took the number of his regiment by using the sign 
language. The French soldiers were very kind to 
him, and he was evidently glad to be captured. As 
they led him away, I tried to believe that this timid 
youngster was of the same race that had destroyed 
Arras, Soissons, and Rheims, but I couldn't. 

Our big Renault was trapped. The road over 
which it had come ended at the field hospital be- 
hind the foot of the slope, the parallel road on the 
left led into the thick of the action now taking place 
about Ablain St. Nazaire. The officers decided not 
to risk running back across the zone of fire while 
it was yet light. None of us mentioned it, but I 
am sure that all of us rejoiced in our hearts that the 
officers considered it foolhardy. The chauffeurs 
were ordered not to attempt the return over the 
shell-swept road to join the others until after dusk. 
We left them, and made our way through by-paths, 
trenches, and behind hills back to the rendezvous 
where the other cars were waiting. It was a round- 
about way, and fearfully tiring to those of us who 
were not in training for a Marathon. We passed 
along sunken roads, and then through a forest at 
the edge of which a squad of artillerymen de- 

215 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

bouched their horses into the plain for exercise. We 
stumbled over the boulders in the bed of a brook, 
and came up on the opposite bank abruptly into 
the battery of "75's" that had been firing over our 
heads all the afternoon. It was twilight, and the 
men were at supper. The smoke of the cook-stoves 
wound in willowy spirals out of the glade where 
they were hidden. The cheerful clatter of spoons 
and plates and a very appetizing aroma reached us 
from their mess-table, concealed beneath a bower of 
leafy branches. 

The final stretch of our long promenade carried 
us through a boyau that crossed a number of fields 
midway between the nearest French and German 
artillery positions, though in the hush of the even- 
ing there was no noise more awesome than the sound 
of our voices and the chatter of birds in the hedges. 
When we came out of the boyau, close to the 
wooded clump of trees where we were to rendez- 
vous, the big Renault was just rolling up. The 
chauffeurs had anticipated their orders a bit, for it 
was not yet quite dark. The enemy's gunners, evi- 
dently convinced that they had bottled the car up, 
were at supper. Before they had recovered from 
their astonishment over its sudden appearance, the 

216 



ONE DAY (JULY 8) IN THE ARTOIS SECTOR 

car had rounded the bend and was dashing down 
the straight road in the opposite direction. 

The head chauffeur had all the audacity and 
spirit of a hero of romance. He had been ordered 
to wait until dusk, but that was an indefinite time. 
He chafed at being caught in a trap, he said. He 
cranked up, and picked his way cautiously back 
over the broken highway. It was strewn with heaps 
of dirt, and five shot-holes in the center forced him 
each time to descend into the ditch and climb out 
again. The Germans had been caught napping 
and had only a moment in which to fire an ineffec- 
tive shell in its wake before the car was out of sight 
and range behind the trees at the crest of the slope. 
The last shell started something and a brisk en- 
gagement between the French and German batter- 
ies followed. 

In whatever opportunities we had to observe them 
and in the trying positions in which we occasionally 
found ourselves, the gallantry of the French army 
chauffeurs was splendid. They were always cool, 
always ready to carry new adventures through with 
admirable courage and elan. This brilliant dash 
across the road raked by the enemy's fire in a mod- 
ern steel-gray motor car is reminiscent somehow 

817 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

of the spirit of Balaklava or of Pickett's charge at 
Gettysburg. 

We were back in the line of secondary defense 
at Jouy St. Servins, where we stopped for coffee. 
It was a quaint little town, with an old church 
steeple behind the duck-pond and watering-trough ; 
a peaceful, bucolic background for the movement 
of batteries, the chugging motors, the marching of 
armed men, and the neighing of cavalry horses gal- 
loping up to the trough at the water-call. 

The dining-room and kitchen of the little auberge 
were one, a wide open fireplace reaching to the ceil- 
ing, and a chicken turning on a spit over the embers 
of a wood fire. The wainscoting on the walls was 
dingy, and smoke begrimed the beams overhead. 
About the tables were soldiers in gray coats, in 
blue coats, or no coats at all. They were playing 
games or scratching laboriously at letters and post- 
cards. A lumbering Porthos slammed his cards on 
the table ; a maid in a blue smock was serving bottles 
of wine. It might have been a page out of "The 
Three Musketeers." 

We finished our coffee and went out into the 
gloom. The head-lights of the cars were blinking 
at us with owl-like eyes. Through the narrow 

218 



ONE DAY (JULY 8) IN THE ARTOIS SECTOR 

street came the clump, clump of hobnailed boots on 
the cobbles. The soldiers swung into the village 
green and company after company passed on. 
They were humming "Sambre et Meuse," and the 
rhythmic beat of the music followed them into the 
night. 

"Le Regiment de Sambre-et-Meuse 
Marchait toujours au cri de liberte 
Cherchant la route glorieuse 
Qui le conduit a I'immortalite." 

A regiment of infantry was going up to the front. 
We were going away from it. 



221 



CHAPTER X 

AFTERWARD 
MOTORING IN THE PATH OF WAR 

A shell-swept ribbon of "No Man's Land" be- 
gins just south of a gap in the Vosges between 
Belfort and Aldkirch — near the point where the 
boundaries of Switzerland, France and Germany- 
meet. It zigzags its way upward — a region of 
deafening thunder and unearthly silences — along 
the slopes and valleys of the mountains to Ste. 
Marie aux Mines. On either side of it are ridges 
of fresh-turned earth. At varying distances back 
of the ridges — in copses, gullies and sheltered posi- 
tions — are gray-nosed guns partially concealed by 
overhanging branches or beneath embankments of 
earth and dead leaves. 

This line is in German territory — in Alsace. 
Leaving the valley of the 111, it climbs up into what 
was once a region of fir-clad slopes, deep ravines, 
glinting rivers and sleepy little mountain towns, 
each with its white church tower rising above the 

%%% 



AFTERWARD 

slate-colored roofs. East of St. Die the line swings 
northwest, crosses the frontier into France, and 
then carries on beyond Luneville and Nancy to 
Pont-a-Mousson. Up to this point, although still 
in France, it is close to the German boundary. 
From Pont-a-Mousson it forms a wedge, running 
southwest to St. Mihiel on the River Meuse and 
promptly doubling back again before it sweeps 
around Verdun in a long curve. Straightened out, 
it again crosses the Meuse, cuts through the Forest 
of Argonne, crosses the upper waters of the Aisne 
and runs almost due west to the country of chalky 
ridges and wide undulating horizons that is known 
as the Champagne district. 

At Auberive, near Rheims, it bends north and 
sweeps about the old cathedral town to Berry-au- 
Bac on the Aisne. Then it continues westward 
between the river and the Craonne plateau to the 
town of Ribecourt, above Compiegne. From this 
point to the Channel, running almost due north, it 
passes Roye and sweeps over the plateau between 
the Somme and the Scarpe. To Arras it leads and 
then to Givenchy, Armentieres, Ypres and Dix- 
mude. Near Nieuport, in Belgium, it sinks into 
the sea. 

223 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

This, as the gentle reader by now has divined, 
is the line between the two "fronts" — the Central 
Powers on one hand and the armies of France, 
Great Britain and Belgium on the other. It is a 
land where no man may live, a land swept day and 
night by heavy shells, searched by rifle fire, hand 
grenades or contact bombs and torn up from be- 
neath by subterranean mines. It is a region deso- 
late of trees, of vegetation. Though it runs through 
what once were forests and fields, there is nothing 
in the grizzly landscape to faintly suggest forests 
and fields except for occasional tree stumps hacked 
off close to the ground. Though it runs through 
villages, the villages have been swept away — the 
houses are mere shells — broken walls, heaps of 
dusty powdered stone and chimneys rising unstead- 
ily out of the ruins. Though it skirts wooded 
slopes, their outlines are serrated as though by 
some titanic mining operation. Though it crosses 
winding rivers the stone-arched bridges that span 
them have been destroyed. It needs only the pres- 
ence of the solitary boatman to ferry one across 
their blackened waters — the shell-torn banks on 
either side might easily be that desolate land of 
empty spaces across the Styx. 

8*4 



. _ 







First line French trenches advanced position 11.40 a. m. 
July 8, Notre Dame de Lorette 



AFTERWARD 

Vineyards and old manoirs have been beaten 
down beneath a hailstorm of metal. In place of 
tilled gardens are furrows plowed by shells, in 
place of long green meadows are uneven surfaces 
— craters, shell pits, sharpened stakes and broken 
rock. At times the earth disgorges boot legs, knap- 
sacks, spiked helmets, rusty rifles or discolored un- 
derwear. It is a region where nature has been 
crushed, a modern visualization of Dante's Inferno. 

Since the lines have been set in more or less fixed 
positions, practically all of the infantry assaults 
and attacks "a la bayonette" occur at night. They 
usually follow an artillery "curtain of fire" that 
cleans out the trenches as far as possible before the 
order to advance is given by telephone or colored 
flares. An uncanny lull follows the night attacks. 
As daylight comes, long rows of gray- or blue-clad 
bodies are disclosed stretched out in this "No Man's 
Land" between the ridges of earth and sand bank 
parapets on either side. The bodies lie rotting in 
the sun since neither army will grant an armistice 
to give them burial. 

This long ribbon of desolation varies in width in 
its innumerable zigzags from the Vosges to the 
Channel. In some places in the mountains, notably 

227 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

in the terrific battleground about the summit of 
Hartmannsweiler-Kopf the lines are a few yards 
apart. In others through the Woevre and the 
Aisne some hundreds of yards separate them. 
They practically meet, as I have described, in the 
suburb of Blangy near Arras, where the strip is 
no wider than a city street. They again open out 
into a fairly broad expanse as they run north of 
Givenchy and into the low country defended by 
the British and Belgians near the Channel. 

The line is supposed to be some three hundred 
and fifty miles in length, but with its various curves 
and salients it must be at least one hundred and 
fifty miles longer. Since I visited the western area 
in June and July of 1915 the line has been straight- 
ened out through the great offensive in the Battle 
of Champagne and again in the Franco-British 
assault near Souchez and up the valley in the re- 
gion about Loos to La Bassee. The complete 
devastation along this ragged scar between the 
lines would be distressing enough if it went no 
further. But the havoc wrought by shells and 
mines extends far beyond the confines of the 
trenches, back into the depots for reserves and mu- 
nitions and back into former peaceful little villages 

228 



AFTERWARD 

lying miles behind the front. Enveloped in this 
iron band of destruction are some of the most beau- 
tiful historic monuments in northern France. 
With what has happened to France within her own 
embattled territory we are all familiar. Of what 
has happened to that other France now held by 
the German invaders little has been said. We 
have read nothing of it even in the stories of the 
pro-German correspondents who have been allowed 
to comb it through and through by the Prussian 
general staff. I have wondered, as I looked across 
the sweeping landscape in the direction of Laon 
and Lille, or St. Mihiel, Noyon or Douai, if these 
towns were being allowed to carry on their numer- 
ous activities in spite of the great gray host that 
now occupies them. I have wondered to what ex- 
tent they have been damaged by the shell fire of 
the French guns. For the French may not discrim- 
inate. Where the towns back of the front are com- 
paratively safe, they must batter away at their own 
villages close to the lines so long as these villages 
contain earthworks, temporary redoubts or enemy 
troops in force. One is safe in presuming that the 
ruin wrought by the German shells on one side is 
duplicated by the French shells on the other. That 

229 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

the French have spared the hospitals, churches and 
historic monuments goes without saying. Had the 
Germans done as much the widespread feeling of 
antagonism and hatred in other civilized countries 
would not exist. 

This devastated district from the Vosges to the 
Channel was at one time one of the most attrac- 
tive motoring countries in Europe. Except in the 
northern sections, in parts of Artois and Picardy 
and all of Belgium, where pave prevailed, the roads 
were splendid. They were either the famous routes 
nationales planned by Napoleon or the smaller 
chemins de communications, which are sometimes 
better since their surfaces are less exposed to heavy 
motor travel. Beginning with the hilly slopes of 
the Vosges, one could follow this ribbon through a 
widely diversified landscape, with all the distinc- 
tive features that mark the lovely countryside of 
France. It was a prosperous region. The towns 
were either busy manufacturing centers or staid 
old world villages depending upon the trade in 
grain and wheat or the product of the surrounding 
vineyards to give them commercial independence. 
The inns should always be taken into consideration 
in planning a motor tour. In this part of northern 

230 




& 



t 

I 

I 



m MM I 



AFTERWARD 

France they were generally clean and well or- 
dered. 

The contemplation of this fair region adjoining 
the strip between the lines — shot over for eighteen 
months or more by the heaviest artillery known to 
modern science and haunted by the ghosts of tens of 
thousands of dead soldiers — is sufficiently dispirit- 
ing from a distance. No one would apparently care 
to make a closer acquaintance with it. Yet this 
will be, when the great war is over, the most pop- 
ular touring ground in the world. 

The reasons therefor offer interesting study to 
psychologists. Once, when I was a boy in Chi- 
cago, I remember passing the county jail after a 
hanging. The thing that had happened within its 
gray walls was sufficiently awesome and I walked 
faster, hoping to leave the thought of it behind me. 
I was overtaken by a black undertaker's wagon 
jolting its lifeless passenger over the uneven pave- 
ment. A great crowd of men and boys — and a 
few women — followed in its wake. This crowd was 
referred to contemptuously in the papers the next 
day as the "morbidly curious." The "morbidly cu- 
rious" will have enormous opportunity after the 
war is over to whet their ghoulish appetites. They 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

will tramp through these miles of catacombs and 
revel in the grim recollection that under their feet 
lie the bones of thousands of gallant soldiers, that 
in the neighboring villages women were violated 
and old men and children murdered by a relentless 
enemy. On a West Indian tour I made a few years 
ago, some of the ship's passengers returned from a 
visit to the ruins of St. Pierre, Martinique, each 
with a tooth as a souvenir. Treasure seekers of 
this sort will find a rich field for their labors in 
the devastated towns and abandoned trenches along 
the front. 

I am, however, an optimist at heart. I would 
have lost faith in human nature were I not sure 
that the vast majority of tourists who visit the war 
zone will be impelled by higher motives. The 
spirit of the men who fought on both sides in the 
Civil War — at Chancellorsville, Antietam and in 
the Wilderness — is still with us, if quiescent. We 
who can still be thrilled at the remembrance of their 
exploits are stirred at the thought of the gallant 
British army that retreated from Mons before an 
overwhelming force without losing its morale and 
was ready to turn at the Marne and give battle. 
Our sympathies and affections are with the citi- 

234 



AFTERWARD 

zen soldiery of the sister republic that once came to 
our aid when we needed help. The patriotism and 
love of country that inspire the men now fighting 
at Givenchy, Arras, the Main de Massiges, in the 
Woevre and about the peak of Hartmannsweiler- 
Kopf is the same spirit that inspired the embattled 
farmers at Concord Bridge and Washington's army 
at Trenton. Patriotic Americans have consecrated 
the battlefield of Gettysburg, the scenes of Pickett's 
charge and the heroic sacrifice of the First Minne- 
sota regiment are hallowed ground. Patriotic 
Americans will be animated by a loftier feeling 
than idle curiosity in following on the spot the 
charge of the Black Watch at Ypres and the ad- 
vances and assaults of the French line regiments 
from the Artois sector to the German frontier. 

Pompeii, Paestum, Herculaneum and the va- 
rious Roman relics in southern France have been 
the Mecca for tourists for centuries. For many 
years to come they will be overshadowed in public 
interest by the more recent ruins of Rheims and 
Soissons, Arras, Ypres and Dixmude. If stone 
shafts and monuments identify the positions of dif- 
ferent regiments and the various phases of the 
struggle at Gettysburg we can expect to find col- 

235 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

umns and monoliths marking the action on the 
many battefields of the Marne. It will be here that 
Von Kluck's right flank was turned, here that the 
mysterious taxicab army from Paris was first 
sighted by scouting aviatiks and the advancing 
Uhlan patrols, here that the armies of the Duke 
of Wiirtemberg and the Crown Prince retreated 
following the news of Foch's successful thrust at 
the German center. The positions that have be- 
come famous in the trench fighting will need no 
commemorative inscriptions. Hartmannsweiler- 
Kopf, Pont-a-Mousson, Thiaucourt, St. Mihiel, 
Butte de Mesnil, Souain, Perthes, Bethany, Berry- 
au-Bac, Ribecourt, Lassigny, Roye, Arras, Blangy, 
the JLabyrinthe, La Bassee, Armentieres and 
Neuve Chappelle tell their own story. 

Italy has capitalized her ancient ruins. It will 
not be surprising if the towns of northern France 
capitalize their misfortunes. There will be little 
else left to capitalize. It will take a long time to 
rebuild and re-establish industries. In some places 
to rebuild or re-establish industries is entirely out of 
the question. The towns will simply continue to 
exist through the ages as ruins. Some of them will 
not even be respectable ruins. I have received a 

236 










Fox terrier anil her puppies bom under the fire of French 
and German guns in the Spahi position 




AFTERWARD 

letter from a staff officer with whom I had heen 
in Arras. lie had just returned from a later visit 
.•Hid tells inc that even the jagged tooth of the tower 
of the I lolel de Ville that rose ahove the crumpled 
arches has been shot away since I was there and 
that nothing remains of the walls above the ground 
floor. 

There is nothing more interesting than a pic- 
turesque ruin, hut the Germans are overdoing it. 
Devoid of outline, a mere shell holding ugly mounds 
of powdered stone and debris, a ruin loses its senti- 
mental appeal. It is not only a body from which 
the soul has iled hut a body without suggestion 
of its former beauty. Unless the Germans begin 
soon to save their ammunition there will be many 
such soulless heaps of broken stone behind the lines 
where the rival armies are interlocked. So far they 
have spared Rheims cathedral — to an extent. That 
is to say, the job is not as complete as it might be, 
or can still be if the German military chiefs cease 
using their 155-millimeter guns and commence a 
bombardment from the distanl heights with the 
heavy mortars that leveled Namur and Liege. But 
Soissons and Arras, Louvain and M alines, Ypres 
and Dixmude are completely satisfying. They will 

239 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

stand for all time as the most extraordinary exam- 
ples of wilful devastation and sacrilege that the 
world has ever known. Let your American motor- 
ist see them. Let him stand in their ruins and won- 
der, as we who have seen them have wondered, 
wherein they symbolize twenty centuries of civili- 
zation and progress. 

To one who loves France it is a disheartening 
task to outline a motor tour through the devas- 
tated district that I have tried to describe in the 
foregoing pages. It would be completely discour- 
aging if, following the birth of a new France at 
the Marne, I were not convinced that many of 
her towns and villages would lift themselves out 
of their ashes once the menace of Prussian militar- 
ism was forever removed. 

Such a tour should begin at the eastern end in 
the Vosges. This upon the supposition that the 
motorist, like the playwright, believes in working 
gradually into a story and saving his great dra- 
matic effects for the climax. Commencing, then, 
at Belfort, where is situate the southernmost of 
France's great quartette of frontier fortresses, 
route nationale No. 83 carries one due east between 
the Jura Mountains and the Vosges. It crosses 

240 



AFTERWARD 

the frontier into Alsace. It is encouraging to 
think that if the Allies win there will no longer be 
a frontier into Alsace. The extreme right wing 
of the French lines is encountered just below 
Dannemarie, near Aldkirch. From here the 
trenches run due north, east of Thann and west of 
Guebwiller into the fastnesses of the Vosges — 
Hartmannsweiler-Kopf, Ballon de Guebwiller, 
Metzeral, Miinster and the Col de Ste. Marie. Be- 
fore the war there were no highways paralleling 
this line but there were many small roads that 
crossed and recrossed it. There was a fair country 
road running close to the front from Cernay east 
of the peak of Hartmannsweiler-Kopf — 2,800 feet 
above the sea — to Guebwiller and from there up 
the valley of the Lauch to Lautenbach. This was 
a most attractive mountain country of vast ex- 
panses, sloping ranges and verdant forests. A lit- 
tle beyond Lautenbach a mountain road skirts the 
ridges on the eastern slope close to the present 
trenches up to the Fecht river, where a turn to the 
left carries one back up the valley and into the 
fighting zone about Miinster. A road leads further 
up the valley from Miinster and crosses the main 
chain of mountains by the Col de la Schlucht. But 

Ml 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

by turning to the right a byway of many hairpin 
corners and sudden dips carries one to Orbey, di- 
rectly in the lines. Beyond, at La Pontroye, there 
is a choice of two narrow and tortuous mountain 
roads encircling the lofty peak of Le Bressoir, 
which reaches an altitude of 4,030 feet. One winds 
about the western slopes running in and out close 
to the present trenches until it joins the main road 
over the Col du Ste. Marie des Mines. This is 
the better road, since it is in close proximity to the 
battleground. The other is much longer and is 
less interesting. Beyond the summit of the Col du 
Ste. Marie des Mines, which is 2,500 feet above the 
sea, the "No Man's Land" between the lines 
crosses the ridges of the Vosges and swings back 
into France and the valley of the Meurthe in Lor- 
raine. 

In sketching this part of the route, I have fallen 
back on an old acquaintance with the beautiful 
Vosges district. I motored one summer through- 
out the country in the neighborhood of the cures of 
Contrexeville and Vittel and attacked the moun- 
tain passes by automobile on different occasions 
from Belfort, Le Thillot, Remiremont and Epinal. 
It is a wild and beautiful region and, as usual, the 

242 




A New York chauffeur in a block house near Ablain St. 
Nazaire — July 8 



AFTERWARD 

roads in the mountains are generally better than 
those in the plains. I know nothing of new con- 
ditions in this district from actual experience. I 
can only imagine to what extent the towns and vil- 
lages and the surrounding country have been dev- 
astated. French officers in Paris tell me that the 
old roads have been kept in good repair for the 
transportation by motor of troops and supplies and 
that many new ones have been constructed to iso- 
lated points in the lines — particularly from the 
German side. There were excellent hotels through- 
out the country before the war and while German 
was the official language of German Alsace, French 
was spoken everywhere. 

Leaving the Vosges, one leaves the only part of 
the long battle front where the war has been 
brought home to Germany. From now on it is all 
in France and Belgium. Leaving the rugged and 
hilly mountainous country, highways are more fre- 
quent and all parts of the present lines are easily 
accessible. Driving northwest on the slopes above 
the Meurthe, Sennones, a picturesque old French 
town with a chateau and ancient abbey converted 
into spinning mills, lies within that part of France 
that is now held by the enemy. I know not its 

245 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

fate, but it is so close to the lines that it is probably 
completely destroyed. It is not unlike reading 
obituary notices to turn, as I am doing at times 
as I write this, to the little automobile guide book 
that has befriended me on my tours in the past. Of 
Sennones, it says, to translate its signs and laconic 
abbreviations, "Inhabitants 4719 — Distance from 
Paris 377 kilometers. Sights — Hotel de Ville; 
19th Century Church with Tombs; on the north, 
the Valley of Rabodeau. Hotel Barthelemy, stable 
for three automobiles. Mechanicians — Froly; 
Colin (cycles)." God made the country and man 
the town. But since the war began man has been 
so busy unmaking the towns along the line that I 
have no doubt the only thing unchanged about Sen- 
nones is the distance from Paris. From what I 
have seen elsewhere, I can picture the calcined 
bones of the Hotel de Ville showing above masses of 
debris in the Grande Rue and the church steeple 
crushed down to the level of its ruined tombs. Be- 
yond question the stable of the Hotel Barthelemy 
no longer affords shelter for three automobiles. 
When we come to the mechanicians Froly and 
Colin the human element appears. Their names 
stare at me out of the printed page. I seem to 

246 




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AFTERWARD 

know them. They appeal to me pathetically like 
the names of friends I ought not to have forgot- 
ten. I pray that a relentless enemy has dealt lightly 
with the mechanicians Froly and Colin. 

The fate of Sennones can easily be imagined if 
Gerbeviller, a small town of Lorraine some dis- 
tance further away from the front on the French 
side, has been laid waste. This was a quaint old 
place in a picturesque environment in the valley of 
the Meurthe. It was a village of moss-covered 
house tops and narrow winding streets, dominated 
from a height above by the ancient chateau and 
chapel of Lambertye. The Germans worked here 
with a vim. In three days following the first inva- 
sion with the help of explosive bombs and torches 
they brought all the house tops crumpling down 
upon those of the inhabitants who were unable to 
escape. 

Leaving Sennones, which is easily reached by 
motor from Nancy, the lines run close to the Ger- 
man frontier along the river Seille. At one point 
they are distant not more than eight miles as the 
crow flies from the one time capital of Lorraine. 
Nomeny, an ancient French town now in the hands 
of the Germans, is passed some distance away on 

249 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

the right and then the ribbon of battle front loops 
itself about Pont-a-Mousson, in the Moselle valley. 
In other days this was a popular automobile ex- 
cursion from Nancy. It is now a beleaguered old 
world citadel rising out of the meadows that skirt 
the river. It has been continually shot at and 
shelled. The walls of its arcaded place are pitted 
with holes. Many of the inhabitants have clung 
to this storm-beaten area as they have to Soissons 
and Arras. It is in the neighborhood of some of 
the heaviest fighting of the present war as it was in 
the wars in the days of the Romans. An important 
base hospital is situated here from which the 
wounded are sent in motor ambulances to the near- 
est railway station to be distributed by train to the 
hospitals of Paris or the south of France. 

Pont-a-Mousson has been the headquarters of 
the American Ambulance at Neuilly, although 
the work of the Ambulance has not been confined 
to any particular locality. Because of the nature 
of the country and the severity of the fighting, the 
Section stationed here has been called upon not 
only to live in barracks constantly menaced by the 
German artillery, but to render service in carrying 
off their wounded "couches" and "assis" — as the 

250 



AFTERWARD 

two classes of patients are called — under circum- 
stances demanding the utmost gallantry and valor. 
The letters of one of these young American ambu- 
lance drivers have been published in book form for 
private distribution. There is a pathetic note in 
one of them that will bear repetition. He is given 
a case, ires yresse, he is told. The case is a young 
soldier not more than nineteen years of age. He 
had been wounded in the chest and part of his 
side was gone. He raised his tired eyes and smiled 
bravely as he was being lifted into the car. But 
although the young American picked his way never 
so carefully down the long hill he found when he 
had reached the hospital that he had been driving 
a hearse instead of an ambulance. 

The strip of "No Man's Land" narrows after 
leaving the vicinity of Pont-a-Mousson before en- 
tering a desolate landscape — the gruesome wilder- 
ness of blackened tree trunks, mine craters and ser- 
rated slopes that was once the famous Bois le 
Pretre. Rocking to and fro the rival armies have 
fought over this mutilated strip of woodland. It is 
not more than five miles across, but the French in 
their effort to hold their advantageous positions 
in the Quart en Reserve and the Croix des Carmes 

251 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

have lost some 40,000 men. The "Boches," who 
held the lines for a long time before they were 
driven out, aptly called it Wittenwalden — the 
Widow's Wood. 

Some distance behind the lines I have been fol- 
lowing lie two more of France's frontier fortresses 
— Epinal and Toul. Between Toul and the battle 
front is the beautiful city of Nancy. A fair city 
of wide squares, of boulevards lined with clipped 
trees, of ancient stone-arched gates, of palaces and 
parks and monuments. Small wonder that the 
Kaiser, in his white uniform and golden helmet, 
waited with his bodyguard on a distant hill to the 
north until word came that the city had fallen that 
he might enter it to the blare of trumpets and the 
triumphal cheers of his marching soldiers. The 
Kaiser might still be waiting on the distant hill, 
for Nancy has not fallen. Nancy has not even 
been seriously threatened, except by long-range 
bombardments that have inflicted no material dam- 
age except for the killing of women and non-com- 
batant civilians. 

Southwest of Nancy, well protected behind the 
powerful fortress of Toul, is Domremy, the birth- 
place of Joan of Arc. The little hamlet with its 

252 



AFTERWARD 

old church and the hill whereon the maid heard the 
mysterious voices is at least forty-five kilometers 
from the nearest front-line positions. This is of in- 
terest in view of the cabled stories that have pictured 
the poilus fighting desperately to beat the invader 
back from the trenches surrounding the cottage 
where Joan first saw the light. It is a quaint story. 
That the spirit of Joan of Arc is again inspiring the 
soldiers of France is no doubt true, but that the 
Germans will ever be any nearer to her birthplace 
than they are at this writing is most unlikely. 

To return to the battle line. After leaving the 
ghastly cairns of the Bois de Pretre it crosses the 
Thiaucourt Road. Possession of the Thiaucourt 
Road was vitally important in the strategy of the 
opposing field generals in this sector. For months 
it was fought over through a storm of shells from 
the German "77V "220's" and "320's" and the an- 
swering fire of the "75's" and "155's" of the French 
artillery. The name was constantly mentioned in 
the communiques during the early days of the war. 
The road leads out of a splendid highway — route 
nationale No. 58 — which ran from Pont-a-Mousson 
to St. Mihiel. The route nationale so closely paral- 
lels the present trenches that in some places it is 

253 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

only a few yards distant from them. On one 
stretch, from Bouconville to Apremont, the high- 
way actually forms the contested strip between the 
lines with the opposing forces separated only by 
its width from ditch to ditch. A dash through this 
zone in a racing car at the present time would be 
a most inspiring performance, but I fear it will 
be a long time after hostilities cease before this 
section of route nationale No. 58 will be of service 
to automobilists. It leaves the trenches at Apre- 
mont and meets another main thoroughfare in the 
valley of the Meuse. From this point a swing to 
the right carries one up to St. Mihiel, an impor- 
tant town held by the left wing of the Crown 
Prince's army at the Battle of the Marne. 

The Germans have never allowed St. Mihiel to 
slip from their grasp. The V-shaped wedge they 
have pushed down into the valley of the Meuse 
with St. Mihiel at its apex is a constant thorn in 
the side of the French General Staff. It is an ex- 
traordinary strategical position. The toe of the 
flatiron is on a direct line drawn between the two 
great forts of Toul and Verdun. The topography 
of the country lends itself to defense. In spite 
of the fact that the German position is apparently 

254 



AFTERWARD 

exposed to attack from either flank, it has been so 
well protected by fortifications and heavy batter- 
ies that it has been so far impregnable against re- 
peated assaults by the French artillery and in- 
fantry. 

As the lines forming this wedge double back they 
run north through what was once an attractive 
landscape of glades and wooded copses to the little 
village of Harville. Here the French positions 
show a recent perceptible gain — the old lines ran 
to the west through Fresnes. At Harville the 
motorist will drive across route nationale No. 3, it 
runs from Verdun east to Metz across the plain of 
the Woevre through some of the greatest battle- 
fields of the Franco-Prussian war. Rezonville, the 
scene of the famous charge, Gravelotte and Thion- 
ville are all in this district and Sedan is not far 
away to the northwest beyond Verdun. 

I recollect motoring over the battlefield of 
Gravelotte, through which this highway cuts, some 
five years ago en route from Carlsbad to Havre. 
We crossed it towards sunset, when the stone shafts 
dotting the field were bathed in a glow of orange. 
There were wreaths at the base of some of the 
shafts, and cyclists were lazily pedaling out of the 

255 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

west, their figures silhouetted against the light. 
In the peaceful lull of the evening there was no 
sound and the thought that war would ever again 
sweep over this wide expanse of undulating plain 
seemed quite incomprehensible. The Woevre dis- 
trict, as in 1870, is again combed through and 
through by an invading gray host of Teutons. But 
there are no cavalry charges, no enveloping move- 
ments by infantry and no galloping artillery com- 
ing up in support. The Woevre district knows 
now only the modern scientific method of warfare. 
North of Harville the lines meet another high- 
way and later cross route nationale No. 18 between 
Etain and Verdun. We are still on the great wide 
plain of the Woevre which sweeps away on either 
side in interminable distances. On clear days Metz, 
the lost city of Lorraine, with the white spires of 
its great cathedral shining in the sunlight, may be 
seen through the telescope from the forts at Ver- 
dun. A network of roads connects all the towns 
and villages on the plateau and leads to all the 
points of interest on this part of the front. The 
upkeep of these roads within the French lines is 
left to the Territorials, who sweep them clear of 
rock and debris and fill up the shell holes to facili- 

256 




The ruined church at Ribecourt 



AFTERWARD 

tate the movement of motor ambulances and sup- 
ply trains. 

Swinging west into the Meuse Valley, our ribbon 
of devastation circles about Verdun. Verdun is 
the stoutest of the frontier fortresses and the one 
most exposed in the present war. It has withstood 
bombardment after bombardment from every avail- 
able vantage point. I remember with what despair 
the report circulated in Paris that Verdun had 
fallen. But the forts of Verdun, still nearest to the 
battle lines, continue to hold out. From their 
bomb-proof chambers melinite shells are launched 
at the enemy and their big guns continue to hold 
the armies of the Crown Prince at a respectful dis- 
tance. 

I have only a hazy memory of Verdun in peace 
times. We stopped for dinner at the Hotel des 
Trois Maures, a sleepy little inn. The streets of 
the town were also slumbering and from the bridge 
across the river somnolent fishermen were watch- 
ing the oily surface of the water below. Its mod- 
ern forts, with their grass-covered parapets, looked 
no more formidable from a distance than bunkers 
on a golf course. 

Crossing the Meuse near Consonvoye, the 

259 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

trenches, still keeping close together, run through 
the Bois de Malancourt up to the battered town 
of Varennes, where they enter the famous Forest 
of Argonne. South of this point, above the valley 
of the Aire, is Clermont-en-Argonne. Here we 
are back again on route nationale No. 3 which we 
crossed coming north from St. Mihiel in the 
Woevre. It is the main highway from Paris to 
Metz and southern Germany. 

At the beginning of the war Clermont was rav- 
aged by the Fourth Reserve Corps of the Fifth 
German Army under command of the Crown 
Prince. It was a small town of no military impor- 
tance, even though it was situated on a hill and 
afforded, as my motoring guide book says, a beau 
panorama. It was a small tourists' center known 
apparently only to cycling members of the Touring 
Club. The Teuton advance guard burned it, leveled 
its houses and wrecked its church. In the sacking 
of this unoffending little village the Hope of the 
Hohenzollerns has accomplished a completely satis- 
fying performance. But as the tide of war surged 
backward Clermont was left well behind the lines. 
As the women of the Champagne district have 
edged on in the rear of their advancing troops and 

260 




German prisoner and his captor near Ablain St. Nazaire 



AFTERWARD 

cultivated vineyards and truck gardens while 
throwing themselves flat before the crackle of arriv- 
ing shells, so the people of Clermont, undismayed, 
are rebuilding. The rap rap of hammers is more 
audible than the sullen roar of distant guns in ac- 
tion, tipsy walls and chimneys are being shored up 
and new roof trees are being trimmed to replace the 
old. 

Just west of Clermont is the shattered town of 
Ste. Menehould. I retain a pleasant memory of 
the place because of its clean little inn, the Hotel 
de Metz. The town is not without historic interest. 
On the Avenue Victor Hugo is the posting house 
where Louis XVI, on his attempted flight from 
France in 1791, was recognized by "Old Dragoon 
Drouet." Ste. Menehould is on the upper reaches 
of the Aisne. Follow the river north through the 
wooded slopes and knolls of the Argonne to the 
lines west of Ville-sur-Tourbe. Devastation far 
and wide marks this territory. In the great of- 
fensive of the Battle of Champagne the terrain 
was swept clear. There are no trees, no houses, the 
landscape is complete desolation. It marks, how- 
ever, the first substantial gain by the French over 
a length of front since the Marne. Running due 

263 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

west from Ville-sur-Tourbe, the trenches circle the 
famous Butte de Mesnil, where fearful losses were 
reported during the action in September. The 
lines now run south of Tahure and the Butte de 
Souain through a weird country of chalk hills, vine- 
yards and scraggy woodland. At Cabane they 
swing southwest and cross the main highway from 
St. Hilaire to St. Souplet before touching Aube- 
rive-sur-Suippes. This is the front of the Cham- 
pagne battle, in which more troops were employed, 
more heavy artillery involved and more casualties 
reported than in any general action on the western 
front since the first drive on Paris. 

To one who ceased to be neutral after the sink- 
ing of the Lusitama and whose sympathies are with 
the Allies, this consistent advance against the Ger- 
man forces is most encouraging. Before February, 
1915, the German position was on the line Souain- 
Perthes les Hurlus-Beausejeur. After the first 
offensive it was forced backward through Souain- 
Bois Sabot-Butte de Mesnil. Since the general 
action of last September it has been established on 
the line Auberive-Cabane and in a general direc- 
tion south of Tahure to a point north of Ville-sur- 
Tourbe. 

264 



AFTERWARD 

In this great battle, however, what had been a 
strip of "No Man's Land" before became one 
vast charnel house. The Germans were pushed 
back varying distances from two to fourteen kilo- 
meters. There has probably never before in the his- 
tory of warfare been an action on a front of ap- 
proximately thirty-five kilometers that engaged 
such tremendous forces of men and guns and left 
behind such horrible devastation. Beginning on 
the right flank of the French lines in the buttes and 
ravines of the peculiar Main de Massiges, where 
bitter combats followed one after the other on Sep- 
tember 26th as the Germans retired, the landscape 
is devoid of character. It is like a dump heap on the 
outskirts of some large western town. Some of 
the craters are fifty feet in diameter. About 
Perthes and the Butte de Mesnil the same condi- 
tions prevail and all the roads in the fighting zone 
have been completely destroyed. 

After passing the left wing of the French armies 
during the Battle of Champagne the old lines are 
about the same. They sweep through the flat 
country near Rheims between the Vesle and the 
Aisne and across the one time flying field of 
Betheny. 

265 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

Many pilgrims will be attracted to Rheims when 
the war is over. They will go to view the damage 
done to one of the most beautiful Gothic edifices in 
Europe. The town will also make an attractive 
center for excursions to all the neighboring battle- 
fields and the two hotels on either side of the place 
in front of the cathedral will undoubtedly be re- 
stored. One, the Hotel du Lion d'Or, has not 
been so badly damaged but what its restoration can 
be easily accomplished. For sentimental reasons I 
trust that the Grand Hotel on the other side of the 
place will be rebuilt and again throw its doors open 
to the motoring public. 

Leaving the Rheims neighborhood to work west- 
ward along the lines we reach Berry-au-Bac. Fur- 
ther along is Craonne, the little town within the 
present German lines from which the plateau takes 
its name. 

The Craonne Plateau, seized upon by the 
Germans after the great retreat, was favored 
as a strategical position as far back as the days 
of Napoleon. Conditions change sometimes over 
night, but when I was in the Aisne region last Sum- 
mer the lines were generally further apart than in 
many of the other sectors. The French held the 

266 




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03 O 

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o> c 

-G_ 



AFTERWARD 

trenches close to the river with their batteries well 
placed in hidden positions some distance in the 
rear. The white scar of the German trenches 
nicked the slopes of the Craonne Plateau and their 
supporting artillery was usually close behind. 
Numerous small country roads lead in and out of 
the present lines. After reaching Soissons, which 
is a town of sufficient initiative to promptly re- 
build as soon as the German menace is removed, 
they run for a short distance not far north of route 
nationale No. 31, a well-constructed highway that 
has been of the greatest service to France in trans- 
porting men and munitions through the valley. 

The general line of the present trenches from 
the Woevre to the Oise has been sketched and the 
points of interest touched upon. South of this 
strip is a country that will be of compelling inter- 
est after the war is over and the various actions 
that determined the Battle of the Marne are more 
clearly understood. I am no military expert. 
I do not presume to comprehend the general 
strategy that the various staffs of the different 
armies were forced to solve. Consideration of 
thrusts and assaults, of flanking movements and 
sudden retreats and of the innumerable technical 

269 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

problems that were confronted by the army chiefs 
should be deferred until the army chiefs are at lib- 
erty to interpret them after the war is over. But 
as a matter of interest to the motoring reader it 
might be well to outline the battle positions before 
the great French offensive began. The general 
action was commenced on the line from Paris to 
Vitry-le-Francois. On the left flank of the Allied 
forces was Maunoury's Sixth Army and then the 
three British Corps under General French with a 
cavalry division filling the gap between its right 
flank and General Franchet d'Esperey's Fifth 
Army. General Foch's Ninth Army, which was the 
pivotal point of the fighting about La Fere Cham- 
penoise, took its position on d'Esperey's right with 
the Fourth Army under General Langle de Caryl 
adjoining and the Third Army on the right wing 
between Bar-le-Duc and St. Mihiel. 

The opposing German forces from west to east 
were Von Kluck's First Army, with four regular 
corps, two in reserve and a corps of cavalry, with 
its right resting on the Grand Morin. Adjoining 
it was Von Buelow's Army, composed of the 7th 
and 10th Prussian Guard Corps, another in reserve 
and a cavalry corps. In the center was the Third 

270 



AFTERWARD 

Army — the 12th and 19th Saxons — and continuing 
eastward the Fourth Army under Albrecht of 
Wurtemberg, who commanded three army corps, 
two in reserve and a division of cavalry, and on the 
left wing the Fifth Army under the German Crown 
Prince, composed of the 5th, 13th and 16th corps, 
two reserve corps and a cavalry division, with its 
front extending from the Aisne to the Meuse above 
Verdun. 

The most important of the battlefields include 
Montmirail, doubly famous since the days of Na- 
poleon, Champeubert, Vauchamps, Mormant, La 
Fere Champenoise and Sezanne. Many of the 
smaller towns that lie within this general line were 
the scenes of important actions, of desperate bayo- 
net charges and gallant infantry assaults. The 
French, called by the Germans a decadent race, 
caught on the flank by the unexpected violation 
of Belgium, with all their vast mobilization cen- 
tered on the eastern frontier, suddenly changed 
front and with the help of the British and Belgians 
managed to reform a battle line, and after three 
days of defeat to turn and roll back the Prussian 
military machine. 

Leaving the Aisne Valley north of Vic-sur- 

271 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

Aisne, the battle lines draw closer together as thej r 
swing in a gradual curve through the Foret de 
FAigle. They cross the Oise north of Compiegne 
at Ribecourt and then run north through Lassigny. 
This was the scene of one of the bitterest fights in 
the Battle of the Aisne that followed a month 
after the turning point at the Marne. We are 
now driving almost due north to Roye — a strategic 
position of some importance on a fertile plateau. 
It was strongly protected by enormous earthworks 
and bombshelters. The strip of "No Man's Land" 
grows wider. Back of Roye to the east is St. 
Quentin, an old French town within the territory 
now held by Germany. The British retreated 
through St. Quentin after the fight at Mons in 
what has been called by experts one of the finest 
rearguard actions in military history. 

Another old French town, Peronne, lies on the 
right as one motors north. Again the intersecting 
roads allow easy access to the lines. For this sector 
the motorist may establish headquarters at Com- 
piegne or Amiens. The stretch over the plateau 
between the Oise and the Somme has not appeared 
as frequently in the communiques as some of the 
other sectors on the battle front. But following 

272 






/ 



Poilus back of the lines in the Artois sector waiting for 
dusk to take their places at the front 



AFTERWARD 

the Marne, actions of great importance occurred 
in this neighborhood as the right flank of the in- 
vading army was rolled back. On the left of Mau- 
noury's Sixth Army suddenly appeared Castelnau 
with his corps from the Argonne. It had been 
quickly transferred to Beauvais and then brought 
eastward again. Three divisions of Territorials 
came next and then Maud'huy's Tenth Army, which 
had just come into action on the north. These 
troops had formed a new battle line with marvelous 
mobility. The entire British army, including bag- 
gage, artillery, arms and stores, was rushed to a 
new position on the Allied left wing in two hun- 
dred and twenty trains, while some 350,000 men of 
the French armies were transported distances vary- 
ing from twenty-five to one hundred and twenty 
kilometers by automobile. 

It was at this juncture that the intrepid Foch 
again distinguished himself. Leaving his Ninth 
Army quarters at Chalons-sur-Marne, he quickly 
moved to a new command on the French left wing, 
with general headquarters at Doullens. It was the 
series of actions that followed under Foch's direc- 
tion that gradually drove back the enemy's line. 
With a liaison effected between the French left 

275 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

wing and the new position of the British troops 
beyond stretching up to the Channel, the Allied 
forces faced the 9th and 21st reserve corps (Ger- 
man), the 1st Bavarians, the 11th Bavarians and 
in the neighborhood of Arras Marwitz's cavalry, 
afterward replaced by the 14th corps of reserves. 
In the actions that followed the Germans were bent 
back on the line toward Bapaume and eventually 
driven out of Arras. 

The Germans did small damage among the towns 
between this front and the sea. They left Amiens 
unscathed. Their retreat was rapid, following the 
Marne, and Eu, Abbeville, Montreuil, and the 
other towns of Artois distant from the present lines 
are as beautiful as ever. 

As the trenches run north they cross route na- 
tionale No. 32, a chemin de communication at Las- 
signy, route nationale No. 30 east of Roye and 
descend into the valley of the Somme west of 
Peronne. Further north is the main road from 
Albert to Peronne. The peculiar feature of this 
part of the "No Man's Land" is that no main 
roads parallel it from Ribecourt to Bapaume. 
From here to Arras route nationale No. 37 runs 
first on one side of the trenches and then on the 

276 



AFTERWARD 

other. The lines perform some miraculous con- 
volutions in the neighborhood of Arras, as my pre- 
vious chapters may show. Before the war there 
were excellent hotels in Arras — the Hotel du Com- 
merce and the Hotel de l'Univers. They were 
partly standing when I was there but are probably 
leveled to the ground by now. 

The line from Blangy to Rochincourt is prac- 
tically the same as when I went through in July. 
From this point a perceptible gain is apparent as 
a result of the offensive of September 29th, 1915. 
The former German line Rochincourt-Neuville 
St. Vaast-Ablain St. Nazaire has been forced 
back to the line Rochincourt-Thelus-Givenchy. 
This is a distinct advance, since it means that the 
Germans have been driven out of the famous Laby- 
rinthe and back from the much-fought-over sugar 
mill at Souchez. Another consequence of the same 
offensive is the gain of the British forces from the 
line Lievin-La Bassee. The opposing troops have 
been driven back a distance of five kilometers 
through Loos. This is splendid progress in a sector 
where yards are gained as laboriously as in a foot- 
ball game at New Haven. The change greatly af- 
fects the ghastly strip of "No Man's Land" between 

277 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

the lines that was familiar to me last Summer. The 
main road from Arras to Souchez and Bethune — 
route nationale No. 37 — was not only pave in the 
first place but shot to pieces as well, and the trees 
that bordered it were hewn off close to the ground 
as though by an ax. It ran through La Targette 
and was close to the lines when I knew it. The 
Germans have now been driven back of the other 
road from Arras to Lens as far as Vimy. 

Battered Ablain St. Nazaire is now a little way 
outside the zone where once it was a part of it, and 
Souchez, so long in German hands, is now held by 
the French. The various "massifs" of Notre Dame 
de Lorette, first captured by General Conneau's 
21st army corps — stormed on foot and taken "a 
la bayonette" — are now swept clear of the 
enemy. 

This will be a remarkable point from which to 
view the battlefields of the Artois sector. It will 
also be easy to reach them by motor from the roads 
that circle about the foot of the slope. A descrip- 
tion of this battle ground appears in a previous 
chapter. To make it more comprehensive I should 
have spoken of the towns to the north — Givenchy, 
Lievin, Loos, Vermelles and La Bassee. Routes 

278 



AFTERWARD 

from the towns now in German territory — Douai, 
Lille, and Lens run across the "No Man's Land" 
to St. Pol, for a long time the British headquar- 
ters, and to Montreuil, Boulogne, St. Omer and 
Calais. 

The last stretch of this strip between the trenches 
brings us up to the right flank of the British posi- 
tion where it effects a junction with the French 
forces between Souchez and Lievin. From here 
on to La Bassee is a valley of much beauty. Later 
the flats begin and the dykes and canals of the 
Yser. The British have had to hold, as the French 
officers considerately admit, one of the most diffi- 
cult positions on the entire front. The only rising 
ground that could be taken advantage of for the 
placement of their heavy artillery is well down 
on their right flank. The rest of the country is as 
flat as a floor and is difficult to barricade or en- 
trench in. 

Varying widths separate the parapets above the 
trenches as one motors north from Vermelles and 
La Bassee. Here we are in a country that is a net- 
work of small country roads criss-crossing the main 
highways. It is a landscape swept clear of vege- 
tation. To the left is Bethune, then Armentieres on 

281 



BY MOTOR TO THE FIRING LINE 

the Lys, the scene of so many bitter combats, and 
finally the lines cross into Belgium. The roads 
to the east lead into conquered territory, to Lille, 
among the towns the greatest loss the French 
have suffered, and to Courtrai, Ghent and Brus- 
sels. The lines then circle about Ypres, the 
city of the dead. I can picture nothing more 
incongruous than the row of spick and span new 
hotels that will rise up about the ruins of the Cloth 
Hall. The road to Dixmude is pave — or rather 
was pave. The roads across the battlefields of 
Flanders were not good even before the war and 
the motorist can imagine the condition they will be 
in after the war is over. The harvest of the grim 
reaper has been enormous in this desolate country. 
For over a year and a half one desperate offensive 
has followed another in the stubborn effort of the 
German armies to reach Calais, and Dixmude it- 
self has been swept to destruction by one of the 
fiercest bombardments in history. 

Driving on, there is the smell of the sea in the 
air, the road descends the left bank of the Yser. 
Nieuport is passed and then, between Dunkerque 
and Ostend, the ribbon of shell-torn earth we have 
followed by motor from the Vosges stretches out 

282 



AFTERWARD 

into illimitable perspectives of sand dunes and 
shingly beaches. A wide, gray horizon sweeps 
across the murky waters where the strip of "No 
Man's Land" sinks into the Straits of Dover. 



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